#wee precious flower prince geralt

[bomberqueen17]

liveblogging the aubreyad 1: Master & Commander

ok so. i'm going to liveblog my reread of the Patrick O'Brian Jack Aubrey series of books, in potentially more or less detail, because it's something to do and it's funny. Starting with book 1, Master & Commander, copyright date 1969, which I definitely first read in like 1991 when I was waaaaay too young to understand approximately half the references. There will be spoilers. There may or may not be an accurate representation of the entire contents of the series. We'll see how long I keep this up. I wish I could write it in the entertaining style of my Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt Witcher 3 playthroughs of yore but those were written under 1) quarantine confinement, 2) incredible amounts of gin, 3) after collaborative sessions, and I just can't make that happen solo.

But I will do my poor, reduced, older and more sedate best. I promise that while these books are not quite as dramatically crack-addled as Witcher 3, they are weirder than you think, which is critical.

OK so. We start off swinging with the meet-ugly. In fair Port Mahon we lay our scene, in the year 1800 (or 1801?? we also start off swinging with never quite having the tiny details quite laid down), we meet our fair hero Jack Aubrey, a six-foot, well-built, yellow-haired lieutenant in the Royal Navy, a cheerful high-spirited cove who immediately pisses off the unpleasant little man sitting next to him at this chamber music concert by singing along to the music. Relatable reaction by the unpleasant little man, to be sure. Aubrey is having a bad time, though— he has not been promoted and he doesn’t have a ship so he has nothing to do but get in trouble, and his spirits are too low to get into a fight with the unpleasant little man, though he briefly considers it. We soon find out that the sole bright spot in Jack's life is that he's fucking his boss’s wife, which seems like a bad idea but who are we to judge. But lo! He gets back to the inn where he’s staying only to find a letter informing him that he has been promoted! He is now the master and commander of his very own ship, which we are informed is a sloop. Also throwing us into the deep end of Listen Baby It’s Just Vibes. The nautical language and technical shit comes fast and thick and if you just sort of roll with it you figure it out. Don’t Worry About It. There Will Be Context Clues.

Now that Jack is professionally fulfilled he is happy, and so the next morning when he happens to see his unpleasant little man from the previous night, he shows his true colors: he immediately bounds across the street and wholeheartedly, unreservedly apologizes for being a dipshit, like the golden retriever he really is at heart. The unpleasant little man is so shocked by this that he loses all his unpleasantness, has a really nice conversation with Jack, and immediately gets distracted by the sighting of a rare bird. Stephen Maturin is now successfully introduced, exactly as he means to go on as well. He is a physician, but his patient died and he's stuck without money to get home, literally sleeping rough because no one will answer his letters and he's out of cash. Jack meanwhile has a ship with no surgeon on it, and a vacancy, and they like one another, so it seems a simple solution. And so Stephen shall go to sea.

I suppose, really, that’s the genius of this series. The characters are round, complicated creatures, with obvious and consistent surface qualities but also equally consistent, apparently-contradictory, deeper qualities. Even minor characters sometimes possess this level of depth. Even the cartoony-awful little shit Harte (sometime captain, then admiral, the boss whose wife Jack has been fucking but in Jack's defense so is everybody else) has depths. Unpleasant depths, but he's got reasons and motivations and you do really believe in him; this pays off in book 8 in particular.

We meet Jack's first command, the Sophie, the loveliest tiniest little ship ever, staffed by a pack of utter weirdos. TOM PULLINGS makes his first appearance (he is my favorite supporting character throughout the series, so he will be capitalized henceforth) along with his delightful henchman (the other senior midshipman) Mowett who is James in his first and last appearances and most of the others but for some reason becomes William for a while in the middle, most notably in book 8, and has thus passed into the movie as William. Those are our master's mates, or senior midshipmen. In O'Brian's typical fashion we don't get really concrete physical descriptions of them in the normal sense, but instead get really evocative but nonspecific ones. TOM PULLINGS is "a big shy master's mate", elsewhere specified to be sort of gangly, long and thin, young, with a country accent and foremast-jack antecedents (i.e. started out as a regular sailor and was promoted, instead of the more normal approach where a family of means sends a son to sea as a midshipman), who absolutely blossoms under Jack Aubrey's leadership-by-enthusiastic-example, and we will see him through most of the rest of the series continuing on this trajectory with great competence and charming humbleness.

James Mowett gets a great introduction. He's had a few lines prior to this, mostly repetitively described as (and shown to be) cheerful and generally enthusiastic about things, running around and getting to be the one to fetch Stephen from the shore, and later we find out that he is a prolific writer of somewhat-terrible poetry, which we'll get plenty of excerpts of over the course of the series. But his first real description is:

“James Mowett was a tubular young man, getting on for twenty; he was dressed in old sailcoth trousers and a striped Guernsey shirt, a knitted garment that gave him very much the look of a caterpillar."

There are also the youngsters. Meet my beloved son William Babbington, a miniature midshipman of between eleven and thirteen who has every venereal disease and gets drunk a lot. He also cries and swears a whole lot, mostly while sober. I love him immoderately and we will see him in several more of the books. He never gets much taller or less obsessed with womanizing. Adolescence was hard in the Georgian era. (Yes, this is the Georgian era; the Victorian era does not begin for another thirty years.)

“'I suppose you grow used to living here,' [Stephen] observed, rising cautiously to his feet. 'At first it must seem a little confined.' 'Oh, sir,' said Mowett, 'think not meanly of this humble seat, Whence spring the guardians 'of the British fleet! Revere the sacred spot, however low, Which formed to martial acts an Hawke! An Howe !' 'Pay no attention to him, sir,' cried Babbington, anxiously. 'He means no disrespect, I do assure you, sir. It is only his disgusting way.”

Throughout this series, O'Brian so so so vividly shows and describes the many phases of awkwardness that young men go through especially in military settings. It's incredibly vivid; the breaking voices, the smells, the idiotic capers, the weeping, the complete lack of foresight, the incredible cruelty and also loyalty and bravery, the sheer adolescent enthusiasm coupled with shocking laziness.

We also get some insight into contemporary social mores through the introduction of Marshall, the sailing master (a warrant officer)-- 1) he's gay and 2) Jack Aubrey is extremely his type. Different people's different attitudes toward this unspool throughout various points of the book, but the critical point is that Jack Aubrey himself has absolutely zero gaydar and while he has heard the rumor about Marshall's tendencies, he doesn't care about that stuff, studiously avoids enforcing any of the regulations against it, and he absolutely never at any point relates this to himself, and never ever realizes why the man is so driven to excel at his job. Not even when an injury to his head and face gives Jack a horrible haircut and worse appearance, and Marshall is horrified and dispirited about it; Jack never twigs just what's amiss.

To be fair to Jack, many many many of the men aboard also respond to him in a similar, though crucially different, way. This is a common thing in this kind of cooped-up little setting; you have a guy who's in charge and gives you positive feedback and like, immediately you'll die for that guy, which is kind of how the military works because you may in fact have to literally die for that guy and it's easier if you're intrinsically motivated in some way. And Jack is very, very good at this in most cases, at taking the measure of the people under his command and getting them to respond to him.

(We can return to Mowett for an explicit example: “'You may light up the sloop, Mr Mowett, and show her our force: I don't want her to do anything foolish, such as firing a gun - perhaps hurting some of our people. Let me know when you have laid her aboard.' With this [Jack] retired, calling for a light and something hot to drink; and from his cabin he heard Mowett's voice, cracked and squeaking with the excitement of this prodigious command (he would happily have died for Jack), as under his orders the Sophie bore up and spread her wings.”)

Anyway so back to the plot summary: a very good side plot throughout is that the ship's first lieutenant, James Dillon, is an Irishman, and he and Stephen Maturin were both involved in the Irish rebellion in 1798. When they meet, James recognizes Stephen, and cautiously sounds him out about having met before, and Stephen very coolly replies we've never met but you must be thinking of my cousin who looks just like me but uglier, *so* ugly, he has the face of an informer, and everyone hates an informer and james is like Ah. You Are Absolutely Correct Sir We Have Never Met. This subplot develops into a delicious meditation on divided loyalties and the agony of staying true to oneself while doing what one must do. Highly recommended, A++. Begins to give us some insight into the various depths of Stephen, who doesn't understand tides or wind and hasn't the sense to come in out of the rain but has a deep and complicated history and identity and above all an incredible capacity for ruthlessness, absolutely none of which Jack understands.

Stephen and James in dialogue when they're finally in privacy enough to discuss it (Stephen is the first speaker, James the second):

“I speak only for myself, mind - it is my own truth alone - but man as part of a movement or a crowd is indifferent to me. He is inhuman. And I have nothing to do with nations, or nationalism. The only feelings I have -for what they are - are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone.'' "Patriotism will not do?'' "My dear creature, I have done with all debate. But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile." ''Yet you stopped Captain Aubrey playing Croppies Lie Down the other day.” "Oh, I am not consistent, of course; particularly in little things. Who is? He did not know the meaning of the tune, you know. He has never been in Ireland at all, and he was in the West Indies at the time of the rising. [...] But as for that song, I acted as I did partly because it is disagreeable to me to listen to it and partly because there were several Irish sailors within hearing, and not one of them an Orangeman; and it would be a pity to have them hate him when nothing in the manner of insult was within his mind's reach.”

uhhhhhhh but meanwhile: Jack Aubrey and the Sophies wreak havoc in the Mediterranean and make a lot of money and enemies, to the point that the local merchants band together to commission a fairly serious ship expressly to fuck them up. They meet this ship unsuspectingly, manage just in time to disguise themselves, and Stephen hails the ship and asks them in bad Spanish if they know anything about treating the plague, could they send a doctor over, could they spare any medicine. This scares them off and they go away. But now the Sophies know what this ship looks like and what armament it has. So the next time they meet it, they fight it, and so the tiny 14-gun Sophie with 82 men and boys aboard manages to capture the 32-gun Cacafuego with 319 men aboard, and it's very gallant and dashing and probably should not have worked, but it does.

And a little later, the Sophie accidentally meets a pair of very powerful French ships and gets taken in return despite doing some really heroic evasive manoevers.

The French are super nice to them, and we meet a French ship captain named Christy-Palliere who becomes a recurring character, who has English cousins and speaks great English and is both charming and nice, saying things like gather ye rose pods while ye may and being generally gallant. Until some even more powerful English ships heave into view, and the tables turn, but even then Christy-Palliere remains gallant and well-behaved.

We end the book with the court-martial. Any officer who loses his ship for any reason has to go before a court of sea captains to ascertain whether he did everything in his power to avoid losing his ship. So all the officers of the Sophie, including the midshipmen, including the surgeon, have to testify about this. (I feel like the other warrant officers should also have had to testify? but they weren't there and i'm not sure why. TOM PULLINGS is also not mentioned in the scene which he absolutely should be present for, so it's possible that they were just omitted for time.)

“They had each received an official notification the day before, and for some reason each had brought it with him, folded or rolled. After a while Babbington and Ricketts took to changing all the words they could into obscenities, secretly in a corner, while Mowett wrote and scratched out on the back of his, counting syllables on his fingers and silently mouthing. Lucock stared straight ahead of him into vacancy.”

Spoiler: the jury decides that there's not really anything more a 14-gun sloop could have done against two French ships of the line, so they exonerate Captain Aubrey for the loss of his sloop, and thus ends the book.

[bomberqueen17]

What I Learned From The Witcher 3

So here’s the succinct walkthrough joke I was working on but couldn’t get out this morning:

The bandits at the Inn at the Crossroads give Geralt a scornful/lascivious (which, really?) once-over, and comment on how he must be a big deal because he’s got two swords. The other bandit says, then does he have two pricks??

Geralt answers them that the silver one’s for monsters and the steel one’s for humans. He then concludes by confirming that he’s only got the one prick, though.

Shortly thereafter, we had a short chapter to play through as Ciri, who only carries one sword. In this, she has to kill a werewolf. She only carries one sword, and it’s a steel sword. But, she explains to the small child she rescues, if she gets the right components, she can make a blade oil that’ll let her steel sword be effective on a monster.

So the moral of the story is, you only need one prick, if you have the right lubricants. 

[bomberqueen17]

a big reply-reply dump

gwogobo replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

I probably shouldn't find this playthrough as enthralling as I do, but I do so /shrug

I am trying to keep it interesting. It’s the only interesting thing happening in my life and for a while there it was the only writing I could do, so I sure hope it’s entertaining, LOL.

(That’s my advice to other writers, too-- if you’re having terrible writer’s block, writing anything is better than nothing, and nonfiction and essays are, at least for me, a really great way of getting those gears turning because it’s easy enough to start trying to think of a way to structure and embellish a nonfiction story that happened to you, and from there at least for me it doesn’t take long for my desire to tell a whole new story to build up until I can’t actually stop myself from writing, so-- it works, generally.)

more joy behind the cut, including a bonus AO3 comment:

childoffantasy replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

OKAY ACTUALLY I MIGHT HAVE AN EXPLANATION ABOUT CUNNY OF THE GOOSE. There is some historical precedent for goose being slang for one's prostitute, so every time I hear about this Cunny of the Goose place I wanna know if they have a particularly good brothel that might have given their town its name

OK that’s hilarious. Listen, maybe there was a brothel there, we didn’t actually look!

akilah12902 replied to your post “he actually equipped Quen on this one”

Re: the dead son: huh. I tell her about it; the letter you find on him actually has a lot more detail about how he realized what a lot of the Nilfgaardian war machine was doing was wrong, and like... maybe changing hearts and minds.

I didn’t find that the letter really had that much good content in it, it was mostly him being full of despair. If I were the mom I’d’ve wanted to read it, but I understood Geralt not handing it over and telling her a pretty lie instead. Because let’s be real here, a sad mom is going to change the mind of the White Flame Dancing On The Barrows Of His Foes? 

I don’t think so. This ain’t a democracy.

(Also, the Hearts And Minds phrase comes from a really fucking horrible Vietnam campaign that Really Really Did Not Work, so, sorry if I had an involuntary cringe response to that thought. Ooh it’s got a dark history in general, as a phrase. [link is to wikipedia])

kaijyuu replied to your post “no mercy once she grips a sword”

deffo what akilah said. also, coral was just... sort of a huge asshole, but doesn't iirc use artefact compression on anyone? it was used on yennefer by another sorceress tho, and is quite unpleasant. also dandelion's voice is-- something. i feel like netflix!jaskier is a huge glow up for the character in general, really.

IDK about Coral at all, but you are absolutely, absolutely right that Netflix!Jaskier is an enormous fucking glow-up, I know this and haven’t even really properly met Dandelion.

bygodstillam reblogged your post and added:

/chinhands at this entire thing

Hee, hi! I’ve made some great progress on the Morning After bit too, I’m rather pleased. 

gnomeicecream replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

A lot of fic I've read show Dandylion with a sister? Maybe its only fanon

It’s definitely fanon. I mean, I gave him a sister too, but-- in this game plot it is extremely clear that he is lying to every one of the women he speaks to and is claiming that the woman he’s most infatuated with is his sister, to keep the others from being jealous, and it’s presented as being on the face of it rather flimsy, as a story.

Yeah, Netflix!Jaskier is in every single fucking way a huge improvement.

saffronheliotrope replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

I’m delighted to hear that Morvran is obsessed with horses in the game, because pretty much the only detail I remember about him from astolat’s fics is that at one point Ciri says he’s a magnificent horseman who fucks as well as he rides. A+ for consistent characterization!

!!!!

Go Ciri! I hope she’s getting what she wants out of it. (Maybe I remember that bit. I should reread those now that i know who most of those people are.)

nogling replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

I will say that if you DO ask why Elihal is dressed like that, you get some great lines about personal expression, and Geralt is pretty chill about it.

Oh, that’s good to know. We weren’t willing to risk it. DF was so funny, he was just like, I am absolutely fucking not choosing that dialogue option, it’s none of Geralt’s fucking business why he’s dressed like that.

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

There's a few nice Elihal/Eibhear fics, if that's of interest to you

Oh is Eibhear the one with the dumplings? Ohoho I should probably seek those out. I haven’t done the swords and dumplings quest though we did accidentally do the opening cutscene bit, I’ve probably met him enough to go on with.

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

The game's treatment of Elihal is Extremely Questionable, but they did really weirdly manage to give Elihal some good lines? It's confusing and upsetting at the same time. Thankfully a very small subset of game fans really like Elihal and ship them with Eibhear, the elven blacksmith in the same city.

I mean-- that’s the thing! He’s so undeniably a rad character!! Like, why’d you have to make it weird, CDPR??? 

OK I definitely will have to look those up. 

Be hilarious if later Geralt’s like back in Kaer Morhen and he’s like “oh so this is wild, I met this elf in Novigrod who wore these pretty dresses--” and Lambert’s like “yes he was so cool” and Geralt’s like “... oh you know him” and shuts his mouth but I won’t write that because it would require acknowledging their weird awkward characterization of Geralt as somehow being 100 years old and never having met anyone cross-dressing before.)

bittylildragon replied to your post “geralt says fuck cops”

IMO Zoltan is not only a dadfriend (he's probably forever trying to feed Dandelion and Geralt) he is also clearly Geralt's FWB.

ORLY? Hm, I can see that. Surely someone has ficced this. I mostly consume fic through recs but I see between this and the elf dress-person I am going to have to do some searching. 

 enchanting-person-wizardreplied to your post“UNDERCUT ACHIEVED”

Dude oil has me in hysterics every freaking single time and I live for these play through writeups - I look forward to them all the time lol I’m playing, too, atm, so it’s cool to be like yeah, I know what you’re talking about rn, and that’s so fun! Plus, absolutely the undercut is like 10/10 the best option- like, especially paired with the full beard?? Lol

ugh I WISH we had the full beard. But the soul patch is, at least, ignorable; I can just make it a goatee in my mind, because the rest of his chin is sort of stubbley, so it’s kinda acceptable. 

Dude Oil. I should’ve worked harder on incorporating a mention of Dude Oil into the sex scene I wrote but I figured I should keep it lowkey-- Geralt’s Box O Where Weird Salves Go To Die is as close as I’d let myself come. Maybe the saddest bit of that is that I know he’s not using those to wank with, he’s mostly using them as chapstick/moisturizer/hair oil because his skin gets so dry in Kaer Morhen’s winters and if he greases himself up before he goes to bed he winds up less ashy and frizzy and it’s all soaked in so he’s not trying to live his life with a fine coating of grease on his face all the time. But sometimes whatever odd ingredients are in it give his hair a weird color cast or make him smell funny and he just deals with it because he doesn’t take bad care of himself, but he also doesn’t take real great care of himself. He’s going to not be ashy (not that an albino can really be ashy, per se-- he is, more or less, an albino, after all, but you know. as a very pale person I totally can get ashy) but he’s also not going to pamper himself with, like, cocoa butter and rose hip seed oil or anything. (Rose hip seed oil is supposed to help with scarring, which, he’s definitely not bothering with that.)

which brings me to OH the BEST AO3 COMMENT of the recent lot (and there have been a lot of good ones):

transcript: Mikiwatches left the following comment on The Ancient Sea:

I am sorry, but Geralt is a dangerous bottle reuser and needs to go to jail for 1000 years. Geralt buys bulk spices and puts them in mayonnaise jars unlabeled. Geralt decants hand soap into shampoo bottles as body wash. When will he pay for his crimes??

THIS IS SO TRUE

He doesn’t even buy the bulk spices, he makes them himself. And he’s just like my sister, who is this times a thousand including the growing the herbs herself-- she doesn’t peel the labels off the jars so they’re still like, Chunky Salsa or whatever, and then she scrawls the new thing in Sharpie on the lid but then neither crosses it off nor removes it with rubbing alcohol when she puts something else in there so you’re left standing in her GIANT kitchen (which TEN PEOPLE use on the reg, that’s the farm sister with the crew who take turns cooking) holding a jar that’s printed with Chunky Salsa and the lid has a Sharpie scrawl that says LARD and it’s filled with some greenish dried vegetable matter that smells like perhaps borage or it could be marjoram and who the fuck knows, maybe it’s poisonous! 

(My favorite were the unlabeled jars that held the baking powder and the baking soda. TAKE YOUR CHANCES, BABY. Also the sugar and the salt. GOOD FUCKIN LUCK.)

So he’s got like, twelve unlabeled jars next to the bed, all of which contain salves or oils that are mostly based on the same combo of oils and fats so they’re semi-solid at room temp but melt on the skin, and all of them are varying shades of beigeish-green or beigeish brown. And some of them are completely harmless, even beneficial to humans, and some of them will MELT YOUR FUCKING SKIN OFF, MORTAL. Best of luck!

(This is why Lambert teaches Ciri immediately how to mix her own goddamned cosmetics, because he knows very, very well that Geralt is a fucking menace.)

[bomberqueen17]

Witcher 3: Monster Bone

So for the 4th of July my Dude and I stopped off at DF&MM’s in Rochester; I continued on toward the farm for more agricultural laboring, and Dude went back to Buffalo to continue his self-isolation working from home, but we had a small precious respite of socialization. 

We sat outside on the patio and had a little fire and made smores and the kids ran around and were goofy. In the midst of this, DF went to fix some bit of playground equipment, and came back to where the adults were sitting and declared “I put it in a new hole," standing with his hand propped triumphantly on this ridiculous axe/sledgehammer combo he owns. 

He’s prone to declarations like that and long ago we decided it was best to never enquire as to the context. 

As dusk drew down, the kids vanished indoors to be put to bed, and we adults decided not to sit out and get mosquito-eaten, but rather to come inside and close all the windows and doors and blinds. We contemplated watching a movie, but DF was on transplant call and had done two consecutive days with 14-hour shifts (and had suddenly discovered that despite being firmly within the liver transplant team, he could be drafted in emergencies by the kidney transplant team, so that was a somewhat unpleasant surprise; fortunately, his portion of the job is largely unchanged.)

Anyway, he was loopy enough that he thought Xboxing would be fun, so we all got drinks and settled in and he fired up Witcher 3 again.

“We only play Xbox nude and drunk now,” DF said. “New household rules.”

“Oh, okay,” my dude said, and stood up to unfasten his pants. Unfortunately, both of them were bluffing, but that would’ve made this playthrough write up MUCH more entertaining. So, if you prefer, I give you permission to simply imagine that everyone in the room is drunk and naked, as I recount the events onscreen. (What it says about me that I’d still be taking notes is, well, let’s just not consider that too deeply.) (I do think we’d had about a bottle of wine apiece, except that DF had stopped at one glass in case he got called in, so we’d had four bottles between, mostly, three people, and then MM moved on to just drinking a glass of straight vodka that I had assumed was water until I got a whiff. Well, listen, you only live once.)

We loaded the game and were in Novigrad... underwater, breath half used up. “What the fuck,” said DF, “why am I underwater?”

“Well, I mean, in a second you’re going to die of it,” I pointed out, and he swore and had Geralt pop up to the surface. The water was only like nine feet deep. 

“What the fuck,” he said, and got out of the water, and Geralt, unperturbed, proceeded to run around near the wharf in Novigrad. 

We happened upon a strumpet, who with a sultry sort of fretfulness, gave Geralt a quest to save Crippled Kate’s from a bunch of hooligans who had taken it over to drink all the booze in it. 

The hooligans were triflingly easy to defeat with a single application of Axii, which Geralt only bothered to apply to one of them; the rest of them obediently packed up and filed out after their slightly dizzy leader, without questioning his sudden transition to obsequious compliance. The delighted strumpets came back in to reclaim their home.

“This girl’s wearing the Pennsic Uniform,” DF said. (A crop top and broomstick skirt.)

“Oh, yes,” MM said, “I own at least three of that outfit,” which gives rise to the question, why don’t we ever dress up for these gaming sessions? Drunk and naked is one thing but Pennsic Finery would be hilarious. I guess the omnipresent jingle belts would be awkward when dealing with children violating bedtime curfews... The costumes for this whole thing are very Pennsic, as is the combat, but there’s officially No Death Allowed at Pennsic so that’s one very important difference, there.

Geralt didn’t let the strumpets pay him for his work, figuring they’d suffered enough loss of income. Meanwhile DF went to the inventory screen and browsed the list of quests he’d been meaning to get to, and decided it was time to go to the Temerian Peasant Hideout to find out what the deal was with the girl with the shirt open to her navel. Like, she’s not a strumpet, she’s not a mage, why doesn’t she wear a shirt?? We must know. 

Weirdly, even though we just finished a quest with Roche a few hours of gameplay ago, there was some kerfuffle of re-introducing him as a character, that made us wonder whether the right save was loaded. But I had by then recollected the ending in water of the previous session, so I reassured DF that this was in fact the right save. 

Roche was square-jawed and noble at us for a bit, and we got a quest to go save Ves (Shirt Open Girl) from herself, which seems sort of weird/dumb but like, I guess, that’s, what’s going on? OK cool. On the way out of the cave, DF accidentally made Geralt walk through a bonfire and set himself dramatically on fire, but it does tend to go out quickly enough when that happens. So, for the record, Witchers are slightly fire-retardant. (@akilah12902​ informs me Quen will put you out if you’re on fire, as well as stopping bleeding, so that’s a useful bit of knowledge. We did not utilize this knowledge. DF maintains an irrational prejudice against Quen, in part because to be fair it’s fairly useless in Death March mode.)

Now, I’d forgotten, but the steel sword Geralt currently has is like, this ridiculous fucking scythe of a Fantasy Blade that clips straight through the scabbard and looks goddamned silly. My dude, who has only ever been present for one other episode of this game play, was like “... what is that sword. That’s a big sword.” And the rest of us were laughing too hard to get out a “that’s what she said”.

Anyhow. We met up with Roche in some godawful countryside with hanged peasants, where Ves was off on a mad chase to try to keep Nilfgaardian soldiers from executing peasants on suspicion of being partisans. 

We instantly died as soon as the fight started. Whoops. 

“That’s ok,” says DF, “now I know how the controls work.”

“Well,” my dude suggested, “is it time for Gwent now?”

Ah, so he does know how this game works. Maybe. DF meandered through the inventory screen after the game reloaded, taking a moment to equip himself, and my dude proved that no, in fact, he hasn’t seen much of this, when he asked “wait is that just raw meat?” and DF was like “crunch crunch!”

Geralt instantly got polearmed to death on the reload. “Shit,” said DF, “we gotta grease up for this.” And part of the quest is that we have to save Ves, and she’s got a status bar displayed with her health and it’s getting lower and lower as we fuck around. “All right,” DF said, “we juicin’,” and decocted himself up. 

This time he started off the fight by setting a bunch of Nilfgaardians on fire. Some of them are kind of fire-resistant too. It is super, super, super fucking handy that your enemies are by default fire-resistant, because you can just Igni a crowd and only burn your enemies. 

We did manage to rescue Ves. Finally, finally, someone else noticed she’s not really wearing a shirt, and was like, “why is your navel showing” and she was like “none of your business” which I suppose is a reasonable answer.

At the end there was one wounded Nilfgaardian and Roche was like “ah we should be merciful” and I get that Geralt’s supposed to be noble here, but like, the guy’s fucked up and there’s no medicine in this game and also, as Geralt pointed out, he takes jobs for Nilfgaard sometimes, having a survivor to go and be like “yah this white-haired Witcher showed up and fucked us all up” would be fucking awkward, so DF opted for the dialogue option of “why leave a witness alive to linger in agony what kind of mercy is that really”, and maybe that was wrong but we went on with our lives.

Meanwhile, the children of the village have come out, since the fight is over. DF ran Geralt around to loot the bodies and there were children literally playing on top of the corpses in several cases, which was a bit annoying and also disturbing. Like... guys. 

Anyway. We poked through the loot, and switched out the lovely matching Griffin armor for a ridiculous Guy Fiery flame-patterned sash gambeson, but the stats are better so. Welcome to Flavortown I guess.

We decided to go Check Out The Devil’s Pit. It sounds badass. We wandered away picking flowers and killing lvl 6 nekkers. We found a bandit camp with a lot of wooden staircases and chased people around and killed them, but it wasn’t super exciting, there was a random pit to hell that you couldn’t interact with in any way. Maybe it was supposed to be a mine? I don’t know.

Just to see what would happen, DF Igni’d a goat. “Rude!” Dude exclaimed, but we actually did manage to loot the meat so this went down better than the Skellige Bunny Crimes incident. 

Anyhow. Radovid wants us to repay him for giving us Junior by going and getting him Phillippa Englebreit. Earheart. Whatever. He’s got a bunch of witch hunters posted up outside her hideout-- apparently they chased her there as an owl, which sounds like a really great high-speed chase I’m sorry there’s apparently no depiction of.

So we started off by talking to the witch hunters, who were kind of... they’re a bunch of thugs with dorky chinstraps and bowl haircuts and they’re rude to Geralt, so like, fuck those guys. 

We left the rude dorks behind and went down into the weird compound. There were some Aardable walls and some debris. “Ah, nekkers,” said DF. 

“They just want to neck with you,” put in MM.

They did not. They cornered Geralt, who wound up stuck in a dead-end passage without an escape except falling to his death, so he fell to his death. Whoops. Reloaded, had some more difficulties with the nekkers, realized belatedly that they need ogroid oil, duh. 

Properly lubed, we resumed our fight and in the midst of it, leveled up to Level 17. Not too shabby. We also recollected that nekkers do not like being on fire, which, being a guy who can produce fire from his hands on command, that’s a useful bit of information and made things go much more smoothly. Also also, DF realized belatedly he’d been using his steel sword instead of the silver one for the nekkers, which also explained why he’d been doing so poorly. Right, right, that’s how this game works. (I pointed it out. “Wait, isn’t that your steel sword? The huge one?” and DF was like “That’s my pork sword” and we all groaned at him, but like. I’d asked for that, pretty much, hadn’t I.)

One of the nekkers dropped “Monster Bone” as loot, which Dude saw and started singing. “Monster boooooone,” he sang, and MM and I were like “Yeahhhh” in unison and DF was like “Monster Bone sounds like the name of a funk album”

Then there was a roaring fire creature, an Ifrit or somesuch, which, like, well. It was on fire, so we figured it was probably an elementa or something. Also Aard puts out fires sometimes, which did help with this. 

“Oh,” DF said, “he’s killable,” and proceeded to kill him. When he disappeared I was like “oh, he teleports?” but then he didn’t reappear, and DF was like, “No, he doesn’t teleport, I just obliterated him.” Oh. 

In Philippa’s lair, where she was not (though there were owl feathers), we perused the assorted loot. Blood-covered gemstones seemed like a really really odd thing to find, until we discovered that she’d been using them to grow new tissue on to replace her eyeballs that Radovid had removed for her, which is just gross all around. Also, we picked up a book called Care For Your Sword, Soldier! which is far more peppy than I’d expect for the subject matter. We also got a chipped megascope crystal, which seemed useful and important. 

So, now it was time to pick a fight with the fucking witch-hunters, apparently. There might’ve been a way not to fight them but fuck those guys. “Time,” DF said with some satisfaction, “for some Axii executions.” Oh, and Dude Oil. Mustn’t forget to lubricate for dudes. 

“Why,” I asked, as we killed another witch hunter, “does everyone drop creepy dolls as loot?” Why on earth wouldn’t a middle-aged religious fanatic with a bizarre uniform and a bowl cut have a creepy doll on him? Why indeed. 

Anyway. We left the cave, and the dead witch hunters, and made a beeline for Triss in Novigrad to see what she thinks. We trust her more than Radovid; maybe she did some weird bullshit to Geralt in the past but at least she doesn’t seem to think chessmen have literal pulses. “We find her terrible fake American accent endearing,” DF said. As we spoke to her, she clipped through a chair twice. 

We gave her the megascope crystal, and she played back whatever message she could find on it, which was Phillippa talking to... some other sorceress... about regrowing her eyeballs. Well, fair subject matter I guess.

We left, and wandered through Novigrad. “Giant-ass sword,” DF muttered to himself, watching the Stupid Fantasy Blade clip through the scabbard again. And Whoreson Jr still got shooters out here, who keep trying to kill Geralt, and I’d almost suggest that they know Geralt killed Jr but if they know Jr is dead why are they still in his gang? Very confusing. 

Anyway. I had something deep to observe, here, that Dude pointed out, about the whole ecosystem thing here, and I just can’t recollect what it was, so I’m gonna leave this in drafts a tiny bit longer as I try to remember what the fuck it was. Ah, I don’t remember. Someone tell me a punchline!

[bomberqueen17]

UNDERCUT ACHIEVED

DF FINALLY RELENTED AND GOT GERALT THE UNDERCUT

JUST IN TIME FOR DANDELION’S HETEROSEXUAL NONSENSE QUEST

but at the cost of subjecting us to the soul patch. You know what I like the soul patch better than I like the muttonchops so

I had convinced myself I didn’t care but then the next cutscene happened and it was the one with the godling in the house and he looked so solicitous, like he does with godlings, and oh my gosh he just looked so good with the undercut??? Dang y’all, why do they even let you have any other hairstyles with him???

anyway

the literal first thing that happened when we booted up the Witcher 3 was that DF went into the inventory screen to prepare for the fight that had killed him last time, and was scrolling through what he terms his “collection of massage oils”, and muttering the names. He said “Enhanced Insectoid Oil” and MM, who hadn’t been paying attention, perked right up and said “Enhanced Sex Toy Oil??” with great excitement.

Alas. No. What we needed was Hanged Man’s Venom, which we now universally call Dude Oil.

also, an update on a prior installment-- you maybe thought I was kidding about Geralt’s Awkward Creepy Horny lines but I just saw a gifset go by that contained the one about the funeral.

[image description: a moving gif of Yennefer, a black-haired woman, standing next to Geralt, a silver-haired man with a full beard, both facing forward and not looking at one another. Geralt: You smell wonderful. Yennefer, looking resigned/disgusted: Geralt-- we’re at a funeral. Geralt, smiling and raising his eyebrows: You smell wonderful at this funeral.]

Anyhow. Ahem. Geralt, you’re a fucking disaster.

This is the quest for Lambert: Hammond is one of the cronies of Karadin, who’d murdered Aiden, Lambert’s boyfriend. He’s in some little settlement on Skellige and there are guards at the gate and just pirates all through the place. They’re all like... levels 9 through 12, and there are a fuckton of archers.

DF tried three times to do his usual approach with bandits, which at this point is Dude Oil, Axii, and lots of swording. But they kept killing him by sheer dint of numbers, and since in Death March it doesn’t seem to matter how full your health bar is, Quen only lasts one hit, it was literally not worth casting it most of the time.

So on the third attempt he potioned himself the fuck up with some new decoction that gave him health when he inflicted damage on other people, which was pretty brutally effective. With that, and some judicious luring-out of opponents, and using Igni whenever there was a group of them,and a lot of hiding behind obstacles to avoid archers, he managed to clear out the whole settlement. I’m not sure of this, as there was a lot of ambient noise, but at one point I swear Geralt yelled “Shut up!” at a man who was screaming because Geralt had set him on fire a moment before. Like... pick your battles man, but like whatever.

Along the way, we found Orders From Hammond on several of the pirates/whatevers/guards. They were all the same. They were not complex. “Why the fuck would this guy write out simple orders and hand out multiple copies to illiterate guardsmen?” I asked. “Well, for the plot,” DF said. “No-- I want an in-universe explanation for this.” “Ahh,” MM said, “he has a letterpress, obviously.” “Oh, and since he has one--” “I mean, wouldn’t you letterpress literally everything you ever had cause to commit to writing?” “I mean-- hell yes? I would find reasons to commit things unnecessarily to writing.” “So. Hammond has a letterpress and he’s very proud of it.” “This is the obvious conclusion, yes.” “If I was a pirate with a letterpress you bet your ass I’d letterpress every fucking thought that ever crossed my mind.”

“Alright,” DF said, “I gotta reapply my Dude Oil.”

MM snorted. “Sorry,” she said, “the mental image every time you say--”

“Why do you think I say it?” DF said.

We made it up to where Hammond was praying. He was Beefy and was for some reason wearing a kilt with a leg slit which entirely removes the point of wearing a kilt. Anyway, he was challenging to kill but not that challenging, and then he had a Letter On Fancy Stationery from our target, Karadin. The letter referenced the slave trade, just as some bystander earlier had.

“I,” DF said, “am ready to get the fuck out of here,” and zipped off to the nearest fast-travel point.  Bickety-bam, we were in Hierarch Square in Novigrad again.

He did some light shopping, selling junk etc., and he was still hopped-to-fuck on potions, though most of the cutscene dialogue didn’t show the toxicity in his face for whatever reason.

So, we went and met up with Lambert, who had the scoop on his boyfriend’s murderer. “He’s a slaver,” Lambert said, “but he’s remade his life and does a bunch of charity work and has a new name and all. Fancy mansion yadda yadda.”

So we went to meet Lambert there, and went in and the guy’s got a wife and a couple of kids and... is, himself, a Witcher. He’s a Cat school alumnus who adopted a couple of kids and their widowed mom, and now has rebranded himself as an upstanding businessman. Fine nice clothes, just one sword, totally reformed. Totally!

The dialogue options don’t give you any way to ask him about the slave trading. “But just Lambert said that,” DF pointed out, “we don’t know that it’s true.” “Uh,” I said, “like five different people have said that, I don’t actually think this is in any way hearsay.” MM was like “LAMBERT IS YOUR BROTHER YOU BACK HIM UP RIGHT NOW.” “Yeesh OK,” DF said, and told Karadin he was a lying sack of shit.

There ensued a fight, and Karadin led off by immediately jumping over and hitting Geralt super hard, but in the amount of time it took DF to pick an oil for Geralt’s blade, and to hit him a couple of times and then back off, Lambert had absolutely destroyed the guy, and he was dead before Geralt could even really get a lick in. (Lambert is so far the only NPC who has ever been a lick of good in a fight, as it happens.)

Lambert, like, spat on him and walked away after that, and Geralt was like “welp” and left too.

In consolation, DF betook himself to a barber shop, where he gave Geralt a terrible soul patch and moustache combo, but made up for it immediately by going for the undercut, which is, oh my gosh, it’s so good why do they let him have any other hair?????

we then did the Dreaming quest, which as a level 7 quest gave us 0 xp but we needed it for Plot. So we hunted around a house to find, of all things, a godling, with whom Geralt was exactly as solicitous and gentle as he had been with Johnny-- this one was causing harm, having trapped an oneiromancer in terrible scary nightmares, but she herself thought scary dreams were fun and was only trying to play. Geralt made a deal with her, that she’d free the woman from the dreams and let him talk to her, and in return he’d tell the house’s owner that it was permanently haunted and couldn’t be fixed, thereby leaving it safe for the godling to live in. She agreed, and told him, “Gee, Mister Witcher, you’re a really nice person,” and the cutscene showed Geralt’s face and he looked honestly sort of taken aback and delighted (and also hot, because, undercut). With great sincerity, he smiled slightly and said, “Thank you, people don’t often say so.”

The dialogue gave you the chance to go back on it, but DF was like, “I told the godling I’d lie for her, I can’t go back on that now,” and agreed to it.

During the quest he’d had to Aard a few blocked doors and wall bits and things. “Home renovations by Geralt of Rivia,” I said. “I’m good at demo,” DF said. I texted the preceding exchange to @akilah12902​ who had a fantastic punchline: "everything else I have subcontractors for"

On the way out of the quest we SAW THE WEIRD RAT PARADE GLITCH AGAIN. I must know, is this a thing??? What the fuck??? it did the same thing, sort of snaking eerily through the market, and then got stuck under the same cart in the same way, and that was it. WEIRD AND FREAKY. Anyhow.

The oneiromancer that the godling had trapped was a sorceress wearing even less of a shirt than Kiera, who we then had to go see. She met us in an inn, and was like, “I’ll help you find your missing woman, now tell me about her.” Geralt makes much of being reluctant to talk, but then she makes it easy to go through the dialogue tree and share every single anecdote of Ciri that he’s got loaded up, so we found out a bunch of backstory that way. Geralt gets a little misty-eyed in the recitation.

He then proceeds to dream of Dandelion, who we haven’t seen at all yet. He’s in a fantastic, almost bejeweled-looking doublet, absolutely resplendent, remonstrating with a barn swallow. So......... that whole entire quest was just to tell us that since we’ve already talked to everyone else in town that Ciri would know, we should find the last person she’d know, who is Dandelion. But, I guess without the quest we wouldn’t know where to look for him, so. (He owns a brothel now? Gross? Well, why not. I am prepared not to like Dandelion very much.)

Anyhow-- that was enough excitement, and we betook ourselves to bed after that.

Tonight probably won’t have much playing either; we’re all overtired and Girl keeps coming down the stairs to ask one more question and it’s two hours past her bedtime and she’s overtired and driving us all nuts, so. Ugh.

[bomberqueen17]

Junk Dealing

So, my dude has come out to visit for the weekend. (Our isolation circle is this family, plus him, plus his mom, and nobody sees anybody else. it’s weird and involves the Thruway. w-ev.) We were like, well, if there’s a Responsible Adult here we should do something civilized like watch a movie or TV show or something, but my dude was like, no no, I want to understand why you all talk about a video game constantly, and I’ve seen the show so I should have some notion what’s going on anyway right? so hook me up.

SO... we fired up the Xbox.

Now, some background: my dude had arrived at about 2pm and had brought with him the fixins to make margaritas, and so by that point I had made two pitchers of margaritas, one over the rocks and one frozen in the blender, and we’d also done side-by-side taste tests of the two kinds of tequila and one of mezcal that were in the house, and there was also a six-pack of Corona beer that this morning there were still two left of but I don’t know where the other four went, and like. Anyway, this was not an evening of restraint. We weren’t, like, heavily intoxicated? but we had certainly over-indulged a bit, festively. 

So we sat down and DF was like, well, fuck, I do not have the coordination to do any important quests tonight. This is probably a good opportunity to clear up some of these lil question marks and just... bum around. 

We came to in a camp full of bandits. Oh yeah, we died there last time. [“These renegades aren’t even renegades of funk,” DF said disapprovingly.] Well, wasting all the bandits was easy enough and then the refugees came back and were happy. And then DF took it upon himself to Igni the several beehives that were in the camp, and that would’ve been fine except that a) the camp was full of refugees so he deffo igni’d somebody’s grandma, and b) the camp also had the kind of barrels that explode when you igni them and those went up like Guy Fawkes Day and ... weirdly didn’t kill any refugees, just made them... faint? and then they got up again? and nobody was mad about this? but we were distressed (we spectators; DF was not, he was like “I’m making this camp safer, those exploding barrels were a hazard, what if some guy who can make fire from his hands came in here and lit them? I’m just getting them out of the way”). 

But then Jenny From The Block showed up [the quest is Jenny O’ The Woods and she’s a nightwraith and we’d only gone to fight the bandits to kill time until night so she’d show up anyway, right, I remember now] and it very rapidly became apparent that DF was slightly too tipsy to actually manage to kill a slightly-overpowered wraith. It wasn’t that his coordination was affected so much as that his concentration was, and it was too much. 

The upside is that Geralt respawned back before he’d Igni’d grandma, so we could go on our way with clearer consciences. (Not that DF’s conscience seemed to be in any way clouded, but the rest of us had been troubled. “Whatever,” he said. “They were weeping before, they’re not any sadder now.”)

So we fucked off into the countryside, half-intending on heading back to the crones or whatever, but then thinking, well, why not just ramble the countryside and kill whatever we find? 

Some level 4 drowners murdered Geralt rather handily, which was a little sobering. Also we realized that the Corona was actually the lo-carb version, which doesn’t tell you how much alcohol is in it. (Google assured us that it’s 4% ABV, so DF could continue using it to hydrate himself.)

“What is that thing?” my dude asked. It was possibly a dead whale; we had reached the coast. 

“I dunno,” DF said, “but I can stand on it majestically.” It was sunrise, gorgeously so, and he panned the camera down to look up at Geralt from slightly below, for maximum majesty. 

Then he got into the sea, for reasons unknown. We discovered there that drowners will drown you. Oh, it’s not just a clever name. They didn’t succeed, this time. 

DF said, “I just want to point out, you know, that when Keanu Reeves did Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? Back then? I believed in him then. I was with him before he was cool.”

Then he was attacked by pirates. “What the shit! We’ve never seen pirates before!” Pirates are just like bandits, only with even weirder accents, and slightly more crossbows. Geralt attempted to hide behind a tree until their crossbow guy lost interest, but it didn’t help much. He also discovered that pirates are slightly harder to set fire to than bandits, possibly because they are salty? Inconclusive. 

Every single dead pirate had a dumpling on him, though, which was nice. And we got an enhanced Griffin steel sword diagram, so that was nice. And one of the pirates had a chicken sandwich! Sweet. Fancy new mauve gauntlets that clash less badly with the orange and black gambeson than the old teal ones. 

Another question mark in the water and we dived in, and scored some ducal water, so we don’t have to milk a duke for it. Also some trousers, possibly improved? DF pulled up the inventory screen and we enjoyed a little fashion show, deciding which pants to wear. The one pair was rather puffy and didn’t show off Geralt’s shapely thighs, which. We don’t need to see them to know they’re there, but it does help. 

Somewhere in here DF decided he was only ever going to get onto Roach by leaping over her hindquarters, never again from the side like a normal person. This often necessitated quite a long pause while he manoevered around trying to get into the correct position to do it, and sometimes he’d have to get back off the horse in order to try again. 

It’s Pirate Central by the Coast of Wrecks, and nobody’s got a shirt on. “Nobody wears shirts at the beach,” MM pointed out. “Yeah only a Poindexter wears a shirt at the beach,” my dude puts in. “You should take Geralt’s shirt off,” I said, but DF was not down. 

He killed all the pirates, looted their beer, and then went around putting out every open fire in the campsite again. “Safety’s important,” he said. “Also, you fuckers, I put out your fire, take that.” He passed by a lantern. “That’s contained, gonna leave it.” 

At this point suddenly we ran up hard against the item-carry limit. Geralt was now so overburdened that he could not run or roll, and could only walk slowly. We had to either throw a lot of things away, or sell them. “Just throw out the broken rakes,” I said, and MM said, “You say that to the son of [DF’s mom]???” “Fair,” I said. [DF’s mom has. Hm. Some hoarding behaviors.] We broke out in a round of My Humps, proving again that we are ancient, but like. Whatchoo gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?? We couldn’t not.

One of the things was a note that the pirates wrote to themselves-- an awful lot of bandits and pirates and smugglers seem to have this habit of writing really oddly heartfelt notes about their hopes, dreams, and immediate goals? And then leaving those things around. 

We fast-traveled back to a town to sell some shit to make room in inventory for all our pirate plunder, but it was 2am and nobody was up. We were forced to awkwardly meditate in some dude’s yard for four hours in order to be able to accost him at dawn to sell our things. 

“He’s gonna run out of money before I run out of stuff,” DF observed somewhat morosely. “Could you buy something in return?” I suggested. “He doesn’t have anything i want,” DF said. “I can get my shit repaired but that’s like. 20 crowns.” “Ooh,” I said, struck by my own genius, “maybe you can purchase sexual favors from him, that’s something Geralt could probably use!”  “Listen, I’ll give you $20 to suck my dick, and then you can use that money to buy the rest of my broken rakes.”

In the end, the merchant had four fucktillion Velen longswords to sell to new bandits so the circle of life, as DF put it, could continue. 

Meanwhile, I had noticed one of the lights in the room behaving oddly, and somehow between MM and myself, we had gotten so worked up with amusement that we were semi-incoherent with laughter, and in the midst of it I pointed up at the light and hollered out “THAT WOULD BE AN ELECTRICAL MATTER” [link is to the scene from Father Ted that’s a reference to] and we all wound up absolutely paralyzed with incoherent choking laughter for like. Five minutes. It was so dumb. It was absolutely hilarious. I’m never going to be able to look at that ceiling light again without cracking up.

So. Quality times. 

We sobered up a little over meeting a lynch mob and being semi-forced to kill them. Either you walk away and let them string up a guy for having the audacity to try to buy food in their town, or you have to murder a bunch of idiot peasants. We opted for the latter and got 20 xp for it, but it was still sort of crappy all around. 

Anyway. We resumed our terrorizing of the Pirate Coast, and my notes got a lot less coherent. 

“why am i punching! where’s my sword?” DF demanded, as he accidentally attacked a pirate with his bare fists. 

“You sold it to the guy who sucked your dick,” I said. (This was a joke, he hadn’t sold *all* his swords. 

“i’m jus gong to cut the arms off a bunch of topless men for everyone’s entertainment,” DF said, rampaging through a bunch of scantily-clad pirate dudes. The loot included yet more fisstech! “that’s going in my fisstech collection,” DF said. We’ve decided never to sell fisstech, since it’s evil, but as you can’t really do anything with it, that means he’s just collecting more and more and more of it. 

“i just got a key to a cage,” DF said. “i hope it’s a guy who’ll either buy my shit or suck my dick, i’m full again. oh it’s a barber! can i get a wet towel shave?” “... Those are called hot towel shaves, my dude.”

YES UNDERPANTS FIGHT CLUB

(the trousers Geralt’s currently in, when he’s not wearing a gambeson over the top, just leave his ass hanging out in underpants, and since he takes his shirt off for the fistfighting quest, it definitely has become the Underpants Fight Club.

FIST OF THE SOUTH STAR ok that’s an anime reference thanks guys very clever

of a merchant: “will she take my junk??”

We went to Kiera Metz and got given the Plague Maiden quest. Kiera gives us a xenovox, which is deffo a Plot Device. oh shit this quest is only a level 6? we need to do it before we level up too much to get cred for it. 

Kiera’s going to rely on “feminine intuition” to know when to reach out and check up on Geralt??? A MAN WROTE THAT. “Oh my lady parts are tingling! Geralt’s in trouble!” Come the fuck on!

AH fuck level 4 drowners hit awful hard considering we’re level 9. is wee precious flower prince geralt too big for his britches???

this is like a carnival of all the different necrophages. Welcome to Necrophage Carnival Island. Mind the exploding rotfiends.

both MM and my dude are passed the fuck out on their respective couches, completely unconscious. maybe we should leave them there.

At some point I stopped taking notes, but Geralt fast-traveled from the island Kiera Metz had sent him to to Novigrad in order to once and for all clear out his inventory, and that went just fine but then on his way out, DF navigated Geralt to hop over a low railing in order to shortcut to another street, and wound up plummeting dramatically to his death off a high cliff. whoops shit

we decided it was time for bed, at that point. 

[bomberqueen17]

geralt says fuck cops

so we resume our tale on the streets of Novigrad, with Aiden’s murderers punished and Lambert off to parts unknown. (The post title begs the question: are the witch hunters really cops? I say so and I say fuck ‘em.)

We went to the Rosemary and Thyme, which is a brothel that Dandelion recently inherited. Once there, we immediately were confronted with a dwarf named Zoltan flinging some ne’er-do-wells out a door. Apparently Geralt knows Zoltan, as he seemed delighted to see him. Zoltan was in return delighted to see Geralt, because he had time to utter a happy greeting and cordially invite Geralt to help him in a fistfight. A mob came through the door, and we immediately had to leap into the fray.

We died, of course, because that’s a thing that happens to Geralt distressingly often in Death March mode: he gets literally killed in fistfights. Argh. 

So, behind the cut is more about this sort of gross quest which treads that fine line that Witcher 3 is so good at-- This Is A Little Bit Gross And Has A Slightly Misogynist Premise, But Geralt Himself Is Largely Not Gross And Mostly Manages To Be Respectful About It (mostly?), So Enjoy That Entirely Unnecessary Mindfuck. 

“Wait,” I said, “can you use a blackjack in a fistfight???” “Maybe we shouldn’t have been declining to loot those all along,” DF said. 

So we reloaded, and this time survived, largely because Zoltan did most of the fighting. 

(As an aside, apparently Zoltan bears a truly uncanny resemblance to a coworker of DF’s, who is a very short, stocky, gay biker with a mohawk. So every goddamn scene he’d be like “Jack, it’s super weird to see you here.”)

To regen health, you consume food. Various loot lately has been booze so DF figured why the fuck not and downed a bottle of wine. So we had to search the Rosemary and Thyme while drunk, which in Geralt’s case means sort of tunnel-visioned and unsteady. Kind of hilarious, no other consequences, the effects lasted a couple of minutes and the health regen actually worked, so whatever. 

So it’s Dandelion’s brothel, but he’s gone missing. To find him, Zoltan and Geralt find his dayplanner and find his list of recent meetings, every one of which is a woman (with one semi-exception, tw for weird treatment of a gender-non-conforming person-- I say weird because it’s... just sort of weird and clumsy and you don’t have any really respectful dialogue options but it’s not like, actively... mean? I don’t know, brace yourselves my friends; also brace yourselves because the entire quest is that Dandelion Lies To His Trollops, And That’s Kinda Funny, which is not exactly not-gross. At least Geralt is reasonably gentle about it with most of them, and is clearly disgusted by his bro’s behavior, not that he’s not enabling him...). So Zoltan tears the page in half and says “Geralt you take this half, I’ll take that.” And off we went.

(Well, we searched the place first, and found nothing interesting, so whatever.)

Apparently there’s only one woman who isn’t a dead end, and I was spoilered for which one, and offered the spoiler to DF, but he declined-- the first one was like, right there, so why not, let’s go. Annnnnd it turns out you get MASSIVE XP just for talking to each woman, so that’s worth doing. 

The first one was a laundress, and Geralt saves her nobly from Whoreson Jr’s men shaking her down for protection money-- by dismembering them into bloody bits all over her washing. She’s not that excited about this, and Geralt is sarcastic; he seems to have no appreciation for the finer points of laundry.

The next one is... oh. The weird one. It’s a man, or well a male elf, who runs a tailor’s shop, and when Geralt is confused because he expected a woman, the man leaves the room and comes back dressed as a woman (like, dress, makeup, but still the same hair), and Geralt is visibly discomfited and most of the dialogue options seem to be him being like “ew weird”, but DF, to his credit, was like, “I’m not fucking asking him why he’s fucking dressed like that, that’s a gross way of phrasing it, no thank you” so we muddled through as best we could with the other bits of the dialogue tree. The man (I think it’s meant to be clear that he still uses male pronouns?) makes it clear that he and Dandelion never had a sexual relationship and in fact he is completely and explicitly disinterested in pursuing men, and that’s fine, and DF was like ugh why did they have to make this weird. Like... I could see that maybe they assume their target audience would be weirded out but like, it wouldn’t have taken much to make it not weird, it doesn’t have to be like, perfect-- just, like, it doesn’t work as a joke (was it supposed to be funny??) and it doesn’t work seriously so what is it doing here; it would have been enormously improved by like, the tiniest bit of uhhh maybe a sensitivity reader or something. I don’t know what they were going for. Anyway...  We got the info we were supposed to get, got the XP, and bought some stuff from the tailor shop that had some yellow exclamation points next to it. (Masquerade masks. why not.)

This boosted us to level 14 and DF realized he had, like, a pile of Experience Points to distribute. (There’s a mechanism in the game where you get, like, a point per level plus a point every so often from something else, and you can take those points and distribute them into a Skill Tree thing that makes you better at fighting, Signs, recovery, things like that. So your Signs can individually get more powerful as you gain points. You need to level up Axii in order to access certain dialogue tree options, for example (only in a few quests but still, they exist); you can also put points into your strong attacks to make them stronger. Things like that.) “Level up Quen so it’s worth using,” I said. “What’s with you and Quen?!” DF said. “I don’t like it when Geralt gets hit,” I confessed. He laughed, and gave Geralt the ability to regenerate health off of adrenaline points instead, so (hopefully) he’s much more difficult to kill. We’ll see which of us was right, soon enough, most likely.

We were beset by witch hunters at this point. Not because Geralt has been killing cops and murdering his way through the city-- no, but because on our first day in Novigrod which in game-time is like a month ago now, we got harangued by a priest of the Eternal Fire and verbally humiliated him in front of a crowd of people. The witch hunters tell Geralt he’s under arrest and he should hand over his swords. Geralt’s dialogue options are “give me a receipt for them” or “over my dead body” and we dithered for a moment, but I was like “we’ve killed so many cops, what’s two more?” and DF was like “Fair” so we opted to fight. 

Turns out we slaughtered them, consequence-free, and went off into the night two chicken sandwiches richer for the experience. (Why does every single thug have a lunch entree. It’s so odd.) In the midst of the fight an unrelated NPC glitched straight through the combat and unconcernedly kept walking, as Geralt rained down a hail of sword blows directly through his body onto one of the witch hunters. It was... interesting. 

It just sort of makes me remember... I think circa 1998... I had mono and was in Norway over Christmas break and my cousin would play Grand Theft Auto on the computer and I did not have the energy do to anything but sit there and watch him and part of the game mechanism was that as you committed crimes you’d get more and more cops following you around with sirens on and you’d eventually have to do something to clear them off your trail but if you didn’t you could wind up leading this like, high-speed parade of you plus a hundred cop cars around the city. I’m just envisioning that happening in Novigrod with Geralt, where he’s just wandering around and there’s like, a hundred guards after him, and he’s just going about his business and trying to stay ahead of them like a demented game of Snake.

Anyway, that doesn’t happen in Witcher 3, as far as I can tell, but the mental image is amusing. 

Immediately after the encounter with the witch hunters, we walked down an alley and Geralt automatically got into a fight to the death with some thugs who their over-the-head title text informed us were Whoreson Jr’s men. I guess we’re at war with Whoreson Jr., so that’s cool, there was basically no volition in this but I don’t imagine we’re going to wish we were friends with him instead. So Geralt hacked his way through the next pile of thugs-- like, there was no volition here, he just got within proximity of them and just-- threw hands-- we were like okay i guess this is how this works. Amusingly, every thug had a lunch entree except one, who was a man wearing only braies but his loot was a shirt. WTF. 

Anyway we show up at the next place and it’s 2 am and raining, and this noblewoman just happens to be stepping out onto her porch, dressed in the weirdest fucking dress we’ve seen so far this series-- it looks like a normal dress suspended from a bright red bra, for no reason-- but who knows. 

So the noblewoman, whose name I forget, is accompanied by Morvran Voorhis, a Nilfaardian nobleman who I know from Astolat’s fanfic. He is slightly off-putting at first but winds up to be wholesomely obsessed with horses and refreshingly straightforward about it? So we go to the races with him and wind up riding a horse in a race and-- well, DF got stuck in a fence ten feet shy of the finish line, lost, and rage-reloaded the game from the last save point because that was so annoying, but that means that I know whether geralt wins or loses the race everyone is super nice about it for once.

Anyway on the reload Geralt ran out of horse juice but still managed to win the race. After that, we got to talk to Molly, who Dandelion had clearly been stringing along. She was also none too bright, but innocently told us all about Dandelion’s sister. Geralt gamely tried to go along with Dandelion’s lies, I think partly to be a good bro but also, I felt, because it would have bee sort of cruel to disillusion the poor woman, but eventually even still he had to be like... girl he doesn’t have a sister and I need to know who that woman actually was. 

We didn’t really find out, but presumably we got all the info we needed, because the quest updated and gave us our XP. So... we made nice with Voorhis and traveled with him back to Novigrad because otherwise it was going to be rather a slog to the closest fast travel marker, and once there we decided to leave the last woman, Rose Var Attre, for the next day.

[bomberqueen17]

we took the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat

I’m finally caught up-- we didn’t play last night, DF was on the phone with his dad and it was the kind of call where he paced around the entire exterior of the house being really heavily-accented into his phone headset, which alarmed me quite a bit when he walked past the window of the room I was in because I hadn’t expected anyone to be outside. 

So we went to bed early while he was still on the phone but then I didn’t go to sleep, like a fool, but I also wrote a bunch of the next Ancient Sea chapter so that was great. Mixed success. And, he’s on call tonight, so he’ll probably be at work overnight and we won’t play tonight either, so we’ll see. 

BUT. The night before last, we had a good long Witchering session with some fucking around AND some plot, and we drank the cocktail I had invented, the Yennefer. Here’s the recipe, and behind the cut I’ll explain the Saga of Trollololo and also the exciting Adventure of the Magical Towels.

edited to add ok all this was delayed one MORE day, but also DF’s shift went so late we assumed he was working an overnight until at 11:30 the household was awakened by someone opening every cabinet in the kitchen and then he stumbled up to bed, and then had to go in this morning at his usual 7am start time because doctors’ hours fucking suck, so actually I’ve had two extra days to write this and have not. I have no excuses, but you’ll see what else I’ve been working on eventually, I promise. ANYHOW back to the post, with a recipe.

The Yennefer, a cocktail:

1) Cut the blooms off of a lilac bush until you’ve got enough. Pick the little purple bits very carefully off the tiny green stems. (I got about four cups. It took forever.) Rinse them in cold water if you think they might be dusty. I didn’t, I’m a slob. Make lilac syrup by putting two parts of lilac petals to one part sugar and one part water, bringing it to a simmer, turning it off, letting it cool, and letting it sit for 12-24 hours. Then strain it. TheSpruceEats promised me it wouldn’t be bitter if I sat there like a... well, you gotta channel the hyperfocus here, for good or ill... and picked out every tiny green stem, but they lied; the resulting syrup was sweet and flowery and had a pronounced bitter note to it. HOWEVER, this is Yennefer, so that is perfectly copacetic. 2) I bought a container of sweet candied gooseberries at the Asia Mart a while back (when the grocery stores were wiped out and the asian supermarkets were untouched because of racism), these in fact, so I poured boiling water over a bunch of those and the extra sugar that was loose at the bottom of the package, and wound up with a sweet-tart fruity sort of syrup. (Lacking those, I might have used some cranberry juice.) 3) Combine those two syrups until the taste pleases you somewhat and is slightly too sweet. (I added a little unflavored simple syrup.) Then, add a correct amount of either gin, or white rum if you don’t like gin. (My test batch was fantastic with gin, but MM hates gin, so I used rum for this version.) 4) put in a bit of lemon and/or lime juice to make it more tart, as needed.  5) optional: add other herbal/flowery liqueurs to taste. I had this botanical spirit named Hum that’s red, and I had some blue Cointreau that I put a couple of drops in for color, and I had a little bit of creme de violette. 

My Drink Mixing Method is largely that I figure out how many servings I’m making, put in one to two ounces of the hard liquor per serving, and then put in about one part of the combined mixers per one part of the hard liquor, and then I adjust the flavors until it’s the strength I want (I often wind up with much more mixer, up to two parts per one part of hard liquor, but that varies). Most of my drinks are designed to be served over ice to bring them down to the correct dilution.

tw below for assisted suicide, in-game, expressly nothing to do with any real-life things.

We started strong. I poured the drinks, and DF dithered about having any-- he has awful heartburn problems and tries to have only water after 5pm unless he’s prepared to Accept The Consequences, but he decided he’d try a cocktail. He asked if MM would put it over ice for him, so she got out the bag of ice in the freezer and discovered it had sort of bricked. He suggested banging it on the floor to break it up, and she had a reply to that which would be much funnier if I had not explained all this, but I have, so:

“I’m not planning on banging right now,” she said, swanning into the room in her particularly magnificent way of walking, with a drink in each hand. 

(I know I’ve set the setting-scene before but it’s worth mentioning that MathMom is a stunningly beautiful and of course deeply eccentric woman, tallish and solid-built with classic-length (that’s upper mid-thigh) thick wavy pale-brown hair with natural golden highlights which she often wears in a magnificent crown braid across the top of her head held in place with an array of jeweled and tortoise-shell clips, and she has a predilection for lace-bedecked long skirts, lots of embroidery and hand-embellished trims, lily-white bare arms of astonishingly muscular slenderness, and often a headband with lace cat ears when she’s feeling particularly emotionally-drained. Oh and jewelry, she has a lot of jewelry, some of which is expensive shit inherited from a wealthy aunt who died suddenly 20 years ago, and some of which she makes herself out of an exquisite collection of beads, mostly rainbows of opals. So, there’s an image, for you. She’s decided she enjoys the fashions of Novigrad, so there may be some upcoming augmentations of her wardrobe.) 

ANYHOW. Down to Witchering.

Properly lubricated with alcohol, we embarked upon a little tour of the monster nests of Velen, “through the Lands of Difficulty,” as DF termed it-- all the shit he uncovered whilst too low-level to make it worthwhile. Since we were down there, we figured we’d clear all that out, get whatever loot and XP the place had to offer at the current level, and then move on with the Plot Shit. 

We had not really missed Velen’s fight music. See, when Geralt’s involved in a fight, the music changes, and in different places it plays different music, and in Velen it’s this music we call The Hollering, because it has a lot of lyric-less vocal stuff including some stuff that’s kind of hoarse? (Ah, it’s called Silver for Monsters but this is the extended track, the one they actually play really starts at like, the 2 minute mark of the linked video. and like, fine, it’s cool or whatever but after hours of playing you’re kind of like Ah Fuck It’s The Hollering.)

We found a bandit camp based in a half-ruined building that was leaning crazily over. We killed the guys on the ground and then DF got excited to try killing bandits by Aarding them off the top floor, so he ran up there. (There’s an achievement you can get, for killing a number of enemies by aarding them off things. We haven’t got one yet, but there’s time.)

Unfortunately, it wasn’t high enough to kill a level 9 bandit, so Geralt just Aarded him off the building and he was like “ARGH FUCK” and then started shooting arrows up at us. The other one, we just sworded until he mostly fell off but then he died weirdly half-clipped through the edge of the floor and just hung there by his wrist. DF went down to the ground and tried to crossbow him down but that was it, he was just forever going to hang there. It was super weird.

Another scene-setting thing: throughout all of this, DF is treating us to a very professional analysis of the different methods of Coronavirus testing being offered and what they do and do not mean and what they are and are not useful for; his conclusion basically boiled down to that they are useless for an individual and one can make absolutely zero decisions based on one’s own results, BUT they are essential at a population level for analysis and are essential to get-- just, don’t actually, like, rely on them for yourself, they’re not going to do you much if any good. 

Anyway. After the bandits we swung through a cluster of four Nekker nests, just... clearing them out. We needed a single Nekker heart for some potion or decoction or whatever. We wound up with another bushel basket of assorted bits. 

In the middle of this we stumbled across an isolated man who was moaning that the monsters wouldn’t kill him. He was familiar, but hideously deformed by gross pox boil-lookin things. He identified himself: he was the carter we’d encountered aeons ago, carting plague corpses, and Geralt had urgently told him to burn all his clothes and his cart. He’d been unconcerned, but clearly now had caught the plague. He begged Geralt to kill him; he was horribly sick and couldn’t die and had spread plague to everyone he loved. Geralt contemplated it for a moment, and DF said, “you know, this has nothing to do with my medical practice, okay” and agreed to kill him. The man, grateful, gave him a purse of coins, which he’d been saving for his children but now didn’t need. Aww! 😢 Geralt, of course, made it quick, and off-screen mercifully, and then used Igni on the remains. 

As we left, there was-- well, it looked like a person, in a hayfield, and MM cheerfully started singing the chorus of The Gallant Forty Twa [link is to the clancy bros rendition, on youtube]. “Strollin’ through the green fields, on a summer’s day, watchin’ all the country girls workin’ a’ the hay, I really was delighted--” and then the figure in the field straightened up and leapt at us and she was like “AH SHIT THAT’S NOT A COUNTRY GIRL” because, of course, it was yet another nekker, as the countryside was absolutely rotten with them. 

We headed for another question mark which we expected to be probably a fifth nekker nest, and suddenly were confronted with-- what the fuck is-- oh it’s a wyvern we’ve OH NO THAT’S A LEVEL 28 WYVERN RUN AWAY

OH FUCK IT HAS A GIRLFRIEND WHO IS ALSO LEVEL 28

we scrambled down the hill, to an unknown marker, a cave, let’s go in here DF said, and ran into the cave and the wyvern followed us and I was like THAT’S ITS FUCKING DEN and he was like AH FUCK and turned and ran back out dodging like crazy and the thing was following us ARGH

We ran a distance, and the fucking things were following, and we ran some more and they were still following and DF was like “Fuckit I’m a get into the sea” and ran and dove into the water and swam underwater for a while and the red dot was STILL FOLLOWING and in fact we could occasionally see one of the wyverns as it fucking circled overhead. “What the fuck,” DF said, coming up for air and then going back down.

We swam the entire strait underwater, and the wyverns were still following. We got out on the other side. “Maybe these bandits will fight the wyverns,” DF said, harassed, navigating Geralt into the Unknown Settlement. No bandits appeared, but a number of level 11 ghouls came out to play. DF tried to get into the door of a structure but the ghouls clustered around and the fucking door was locked, and the wyvern swooped. “What the fuck!”

He turned and ran back down to the water, where there were some drowners but they were slightly out of range. The wyvern dove angrily but missed. “Well,” he said, “let’s try the boat,” and got into a boat. At first the controller would not let him do anything but swish his sword around, but eventually he managed to figure out how to pilot the boat.

With the wyvern stooping angrily around us, we set off in the boat for a little tour of the coast, and promptly hit a rock, but fortunately didn’t sink.

It took another minute for the wyvern to back off. “We’re taking the wyverns on a tour of the coast by boat,” DF said. Sure enough, we could tell now that it was definitely both wyverns chasing. Miraculously, we had taken no damage, by sheer virtue of not holding still long enough. 

Finally, finally, the fight music turned off, and the wyverns disappeared, presumably back to their nest that we’d blundered straight into. “The fight music,” I said, “instead of The Hollering, probably should have been Yakety Sax.”

“That would’ve been a bit more fitting,” DF said, steering the boat back toward shore. “Uhhh... Okay,” DF said, “so, uh, where are we now and where are the things we were planning to do??”

Well, we’d intended to do The Volunteer. So we pulled that quest back up, it’s near the bridge to Oxenfurt and we weren’t far from that. 

I’m going to cut this post off and finally make it, though, and I’ll do the rest in a later post since this one’s so delayed anyway. ALSO Tumblr just tried its level best to eat this fucking post and i’m super over the way the wifi in this house likes to attempt to murder me.

[bomberqueen17]

Re-Equip The Swords First

Let me preface this by saying I hadn’t expected I would be so mortified at the concept of Geralt actually getting laid but like. I couldn’t watch. I couldn’t listen to any of the cheesy dialogue. Couldn’t do it. It’s not even like he’s my dad, he’s just such a dad, and clearly, obviously, by definition as most people understand it, someone’s got to be out there fucking dads as that’s kind of... how... one becomes one (i mean, in his case, that wasn’t necessarily integral to it but usually, one understands, that’s normally a component of it), and I dunno, I’m happy to objectify him, but-- well, he’s just so dorky, I was embarrassed the entire time and could not bring myself to ogle the inexplicable animated titties.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Yes, we did the Kiera quest, and I’ll get into that in a moment (hurr hurr) but first we wandered around a little bit-- MM was present but was in the midst of working out the family calendar, so DF cleared a radius around Kiera’s village of monsters just to have a way to pass the time while she was distracted. She wanted to watch this quest, see, so.

As part of our digression we did Love’s Cruel Snares, which involved a pack of level 10 Wild Dogs that killed Geralt handily like three times. One time, he actually died of toxicity, which was an interesting note; DF hadn’t really bothered using potions before that, so it was an education. “Hm maybe I should invest literally any stats into tolerance, here,” he said. “Or like. Think the slightest bit about how this works.” Then the Wild Dogs ate him. “We should come back to this,” DF said, and started to ride away, and then it said Quest Failed: ah, we can’t put this one on hold. So he reloaded and sighed, and focused, and fine-tuned the potions and oils thing, hydrated, ate a dumpling, and eventually we got through it and killed the dogs. 

And that was it. There wasn’t any twist. We went back to the grieving woman who’d hired us, she tried to give us money, we turned it down, we got some XP, we went on our way.

“That was weird,” DF said.

“Yeah,” I said. “We didn’t have to... go find a root, or like... mind control somebody... ”

“No new exotic monsters,” MM said. “Nobody trying to extort anything else out of Geralt that he doesn’t want to do.”

“Yeah.” We were all silent for the ride back to Kiera’s, reflecting on that. 

Geralt’s life sucks, usually. We were glad we hadn’t taken any money from the woman; despite the dogs being a huge pain in the dick, the quest itself had been so straightforward it had almost been a pleasure to get mauled to death by wild animals like, four times. Just-- nobody messed with us. Nobody guilted or strong-armed or tried to trick Geralt into doing anything else. 

 Anyway. MM was with us, now, attention-wise, so we went back to Kiera’s. I’d looked up the various dialogue options for this, because I didn’t want a bad outcome, but I wasn’t telling DF anything because it seemed pretty straightforward. I had mentioned that if he said the wrong thing he was going to have to fight her to the death, so he was suitably mentally-prepared to pay attention, but beyond that I figured we could wing it. (OK I’d also revealed the spoiler that having sex with her or not was also not plot-determining and wouldn’t screw things up with Yennefer particularly, and when we’d first met her I’d been like “Ohhhh this is the one that if you’re super nice to her you can get her to go to Kaer Morhen and then she’s there for the boss fight.” So really, I guess, I’d let slip a fair number of spoilers, but...) (OK the most upsetting thing I read, though, was that in discussions some gamers had been like “but you shouldn’t fuck Kiera because later she’ll hook up with Lambert and it’s gross for you to give him your sloppy seconds” and I was like what the fuck you disgusting dudebros, she’s a person who can make her own choices and mostly it was just gross to contemplate the thought that like, a bro cannot contemplate having a relationship with someone one of his bros has also had any kind of relationship with, no matter the different circumstances or time elapsed? Fuck, it’s so objectifying-- fortunately, the game itself does not include any of this sort of calculation within it. And honestly do you think that would dissuade Lambert? not in my ‘verse!!!) (oh fuck that’s a plotbunny. NO.)

I also was like “oh and Kiera has a ton of shit for sale you won’t find again for like, half the game,” because that was another thing I’d read. so DF pulled up her Shit For Sale interface and... actually bought a couple of things, including one fantastically expensive potion to rearrange your bonus stats or something. Among other things we got Dude Oil! (Hanged Man’s Decoction, which is for fighting humans.)

Once we’d finished shopping, we went into the Hot Dinner Date questline. Throughout, DF has been like, OK, I’m gonna RP this the way I think Geralt really would. So he was like, OK. Geralt would not turn down sex that was being freely offered. He would absolutely go for it. But, he would not be a lapdog, would not go along with every whim, and absolutely, absolutely would not dress up for it. 

So Kiera takes off her clothes (Geralt expresses disappointment that she takes her shoes off. WTF bro. “She could’ve left those on, it’s a pity,” he says, as he’s following the trail of shed clothing to find her. What the fuck are your kinks, even??? they’re not even hot shoes??), and then very clearly puts on a bra, which she had presumably been carrying around in her underpants along with the Oxford English Dictionary Magnifying Edition, because the bra covers far more of her chest than her shirt did through this whole thing. And then Geralt and Kiera fuck, in a simultaneously really explicit and really vague scene. (She takes off the bra, and you see her titties for a while, and then when it’s done, she puts the bra back on, again, and lies there in extremely modern-looking underwear.)

And then, as we’ve been braced for since like, the first time this quest was suggested, she does in fact roofie Geralt. What got me is that ostensibly she was seducing him to get information, but he refused to give her any, and it didn’t change anything? Whatever. (I feel better that the sex was freely entered-into; she waited until that was over and they’d clearly both gotten what they wanted from it, to knock him out.)

So, Geralt wakes up in his underpants, and hilariously you have to like, manually re-equip all of his stuff. Had to tab into the Inventory panel, find all the stuff, put it back on-- of course DF put his swords on before anything else, and then his boots, and was like that’s what’s important let’s just go. 

I was all for it, but he is kind of a spoilsport and went and got the rest of the way dressed after all. He also has decided that the best trousers he currently has available are these kind of baggy ones, oh well. We don’t have to see Geralt’s shapely thighs and honestly are sort of happier not seeing them, as it happens, to our own surprise.

(MM was like “yeah I thought that would be more fun to watch but I also was kind of embarrassed.” “It was sort of cheesy,” I pointed out. “Yeah, neither of them had very good lines.” “Bad chemistry,” I said. “Yeah, that’s it. Bad chemistry!”)

So we swam out to the island to confront her, and DF was like, “so I don’t want to fight her, but can I yell at her?” 

“I think you can, just don’t call her any names or like-- I mean-- oh, Radovid is the name of the guy who’s burning witches, probably you want to keep that in mind during the dialogue options.” Since the game hasn’t given us a ton of backstory, it being a sequel. 

“Gotcha,” DF said.

I actually felt like Kiera came off as more of a relatable character in this exchange. She clearly had fucked Geralt just for fun and out of boredom, rather than to use him-- she’d already been using him, she’d had her own agenda all along, but of course she had? so had he? she is a complex character with super understandable needs and, as a mage, probably a fairly horrifying backstory which has left her with like not a normal level of human empathy, but she actually wasn’t particularly planning on doing anything genuinely horrifying, she was just trying to take some kind of control over her own inevitable fate? Anyway, it was the first time I’d sympathized with her or wanted to do anything other than smack her, and it seemed reasonable to me that Geralt would feel the same-- frustrated, but, she’s not a villain. She’s just a person who needs things, and doesn’t feel she can get them straightforwardly.  

At this juncture, DF revealed that he’d Googled her too, on his own, and was convinced that no matter what he did, she’d die by the end of the game-- but he wanted to get her to Kaer Morhen too, because that seemed the least futile end for her. 

Anyway... she agreed to go to Kaer Morhen, and we got her to leave the notes on the plague behind, and also we found four florens on the ground where she’d been standing and MM was convinced she’d left Geralt a tip and that did make him a gigolo. I was like, “but that’s like... five bucks” [n.b. i have no idea how much a floren is] and she was like “i didn’t say he was a particularly successful gigolo.”

From there we went and found the pellar and did his quest, which we assumed meant fighting wraiths but then the monsters showed up and were water hags, argh, wrong oils, we died ignominiously, had to reload, tried again, fought the water hags, yay. then-- 

witch hunters? Argh, now it’s time for Dude Oil, yet again we died ignominiously. DF set his controller down, rubbed his face, and said, “Damn it, I have to actually pay attention to do this.” Wasn’t timing parries right, was spending too much attention looking around and thinking about the story,  not enough to the pure mechanics of the controller. On the reload, he did much better. 

He hadn’t spoken more than a couple of words all day, so he clearly was not on his game. We’re gaming instead of talking about it. We offered to just watch a show instead but he was like, no, this would be better. 

So next up was wraiths. Three level 7 wraiths turned out to be ridiculously easier than three level 7 humans. Kind of amazing. 

I thought it was interesting, in the cutscene, how concerned Geralt was for the pellar-- he was grim, but sympathetic, and really was acting like he did respect this dude. He wouldn’t have done the quest if he didn’t, but it’s acted in such a way that it’s clear Geralt respects the guy, kind of likes him. His dialogue earlier with the witch hunters was also some good character-work-- Leave these people alone, he’d said, you don’t understand their way of life. Of course it hadn’t worked, but he’d made the attempt. 

Next we had to get back to the mainland, run through the swamp, find a dead body. Kill some rotfiends. Managed, but had to reload when one of the rotfiends exploded unexpectedly. Quen would’ve saved Geralt, but Quen is so hard to maintain. Finished that bit of the quest, pondered ourselves, and realized Downwarren was close by-- good time to pick up the questline with the Baron again, and we’d get back to the pellar a bit later. 

So we went to Downwarren but enroute, for some reason, DF accidentally had Geralt get off his horse, and he fell into a cutscene with a guy. There was a little ! quest and we were like ok fine why not.

This villager was yelling about how he hated Witchers and Geralt should move along, and Geralt was like, buddy. Hey. Hey, why the hate?  Well. Because there was a guy claiming to be a Witcher who’d knocked up his daughter. Geralt was like hey listen man, he can’t both be a Witcher and be getting girls pregnant. Doesn’t work like that.

So we went off to the churchyard where the supposed-Witcher was, and sure enough, some rando with a single steel sword was pissing himself over a lone ghoul, and was wearing a real Wolf medallion. I expected Geralt to confiscate the medallion but he did not. We had the option to be sympathetic to the impostor but none of us could even imagine Geralt finding any reason for sympathy-- this guy was impugning Geralt’s professional reputation here, there’s no way he’d then want to be buds. So we were like “hey fuck this guy” and turned him in to the village headman. Because fuck that guy. I don’t care what your story is. 

Anyway-- that got us the like five more points we needed to level up to 11. Wow! So. Onward, to Downwarren, and the Baron. 

The horse demon had ravaged through the town and killed a bunch of people. Geralt was remarkably unconcerned. “I mean,” he said, “these people tried to kill the nature spirit, so it just makes sense.”

The baron is like okay what the fuck, let’s go, and off we go, and we are told there are some witch hunters also in the bog, so like, great, that’ll be a party. But I’m like wait a minute a bunch of witch hunters out of novigrod led by a young woman? That’s the Baron’s daughter. 

So-- about a zillion water hags later and at least one ignominious reload (DF had accidentally pulled out the stupid ghost lantern thing instead of casting a sign on the scroll wheel thingy and that meant he couldn’t roll so he just stood there tapping buttons and going AARRRGGHH as Geralt got brutally murdered), we were onward to the Crones’ place, and

well. the Baron’s family had a touching family reunion (”Don’t touch me!”) and then a fiend spawned, along with like, a thousand more water hags.

We found out that Fiends can cast a sort of hypnosis on you, which is real interesting.

Also we died but whatever. It was time for bed. 

[bomberqueen17]

quen up and face the water hag

so last night’s Witchering got off to a late start because DF had to have the kind of phonecall with his dad where he completely reverts to his native accent. (I overheard him pronounce the word ‘water’ as ‘worter’ and knew it was gonna be another hour at least.) And poor MM had been up too late for her needs-9-hours-of-sleep biology the night before, and was just sitting on the couch listlessly listening to her night owl 5 year old playing loudly next to the baby monitor upstairs, waiting for the kid to go to sleep so she could go up and also go to sleep. (if she goes up while Girl is still awake, then there are Shenanigans and it doesn’t work out well at all. You gotta wait for the silence.)

Poor MM was very invested in the Plague Maiden quest and we wanted to do it while she was awake, so we tried to just dive right in as soon as DF was off the phone, but... it’s not quick.

We went in massively spoilered; @akilah12902 had written about how she’d had to revert to an earlier save because doing what seemed right had wound up with such a fucking horrible outcome, so I’d read about that and was like well all that sounds horrible, no thanks. (If you would like a coherent explanation as well, her Creature Feature on Plague Maidens is succinct, interesting, and informative.) And I’d mentioned sort of off-handedly to DF that this was not a straightforward follow-the-arrows quest, and DF was like, *heavy sigh* just tell me, so I did, and he was like, “Huh, well, we’ll see what it really looks like.” But-- anyway-- if you don’t want to be spoilered for this quest, well, honestly, you wouldn’t be reading my recaps anyway??? So like take that under advisement.

DF says, after the intro where the weird raspy-voiced super-American not-Dandelion talks while the game’s loading, "And now you know... the rest of the story" and i had to look up Paul Harvey because it was slightly before my time and I was like what is that from so just in case you were wondering, I am in fact older than DF but in pop culture years he’s way older than me. I blame him being an only child.

So, we’re on Fyke Island. We Quenned up and dealt with a water hag, right off the bat. Turns out they really really really don’t like being on fire, like even more so than regular people, so that’s not as difficult as it might be anymore.

Inside the tower, a rat runs by, with a helpful little label above its head that just says “Rat”. DF asked, “is that rat’s name “Rat”???” 

oh good, the loot’s an old goat hide. MM: “Maybe he can turn it into silk” [we were horribly offended during a previous inventory arranging session to discover that in the crafting tab you can dismantle linen thread into silk somehow, or vice versa I don’t remember, and like, that’s not how any of this works? but maybe it’s magic? but why would that be magic? wtf]

wtf is stammelford’s dust it sounds like an STD? ayy level 10! Powerup! Not a lot of time for celebration, but this quest is extremely generous with the XP, for the record, you get a lot of points for just looking at things. 

we’re like. detective-ing around with this magic green lamp, and Kiera keeps breaking in to talk to Geralt on the Magic Whizzbang Talker Device. It was actually confusing-- at one point Geralt starts talking and he’s using a strangely like, well-supported and not gravelly voice, and I realized belatedly it’s because he’s talking on the phone, more or less. How does Geralt already have a phone voice? how is he used to that? Worldbuilding question...

this is taking concentration. Sherlock fucking Holmes here. oh no now there’s a sad lady ghost, we have to talk to her.

oh gross, a sad lady ghost who got eaten alive by rats while paralyzed. I mean, we knew that was coming but like, gross, people. 

And here’s the thing: if you haven’t been spoilered for this quest, there is no way you would figure out what was really up. Like, no way. We went in looking for the clues, knowing there were clues, and nothing, nothing anywhere in the actual text of the game gives you any idea that like, This Is A Plague Factory And This Ghost That Is Weirdly Different From Other Ghosts Is Going To Kill Thousands Of People If You Don’t Take A Specific Set Of Actions. We were like ok all we know for sure is that we shouldn’t go take her bones so she can get off the island, where’s the supporting documentation for this? 

There is none. You just have to-- not pick the option that seems most sensible. And then you leave the encounter and there’s no information on what to do next. So you wander around looking for more clues, which there aren’t really-- you can find some other ghosts, or echoes of what happened, but they don’t tell you much. I guess them observing that the rats in the basement seem sick is a clue? But it’s not a Hey Don’t Take Anything Off This Island With You kind of clue, especially since the place is filled with loot that you of course are going to take with you because that is the basic mechanic of most video games, that you pick up things you find to use later.  And like, there’s a ghost that definitely is of someone who came later, a looter, he observes that everyone here’s been dead so long it’s amazing there’s stuff to find yay and then something killed him, but like. It’s obvious there’s bad shit in here? It’s not surprising your Sad Lady Ghost might kill someone who came to steal? Like, that’s not much of a clue, except confirmation of why Kiera should be interested, because this is an ongoing Cursed Situation that’s getting people from her village killed and thus is reasonably her business as the village witch relying on the villagers’ goodwill to not get turned in to the witch-hunters. [Except having purposely spoilered myself further, I get that we’re not supposed to find that a plausible reason for her extreme interest in this site, so this bit kind of fails on two levels.]

There’s also a conspicuously Locked Door, and we’re like ah, that must be a clue too. What’s Behind That Door, hm??? Exciting. So we searched and searched, and I finally was like hey @akilah12902 where is the key to that door and she was like Oh. There isn’t one. It’s just another door to outside, that’s locked. You can go outside and look at it from the other side. That’s all it is.

Well what the fuck, why have a door at all? Or why not have it unlocked, or Aard-able or something? The quest is confusing enough, why put in a random dead-end like that just to make you run around and verify that it’s nothing? (We later verified: Yeah, that’s just the other entry door. It’s just locked, it goes from outdoors to the main entry lobby area. I guess to show that the peasants didn’t break in that way, but were let in the front door? But it doesn’t say that, Geralt doesn’t observe that, it just looks like all the other quests where part of it is that you have to figure out how to unlock a door to find out what’s behind it. And like, it says outright, elsewhere, that yeah, the peasants were let in, because clearly nobody expected the mob to attack.)

So we tried to leave through the door we’d entered through, and then the sad lady ghost became a monster and was like RAHHH WE FIGHT NOW, and we were like okay so she is not just a sad lady ghost, that’s good to have confirmation of. She is, in fact a Pesta, and now we can look up what a Pesta is and -- see, though, like, that’s also spoilering yourself. You can’t just get through this quest on the information presented and arrive at a correct conclusion! 

ANYHOW back to the fun recap. So the Pesta killed us, because DF was slightly distracted because poor MM had passed the fuck out on the couch and the baby monitor was silent, so he had to wake up his wife to put her to bed and she was very sad and confused and he promised not to do anything too fun or plot-significant without her. But we’ve kind of written this quest off as being, like, not adequately explained in-universe anyway, so we’ll finish it up. 

So we did. Reloaded, fought the Pesta briefly, then went back to Kiera who obligingly told us where to find the Missing True Love the ghost is obsessed with, so there’s that; there’d been no indication we were going to get any further leads on how to finish the quest if we didn’t agree to take the pesta’s bones, which because we were spoilered we knew would end up unleashing plague on the Continent, which is super fucking gross and not what we wanted to do. (I guess the justification is that I mean it doesn’t mean Geralt can’t go on to win the game so like, whatever, it’s just a quest outcome, either one is fine narratively, but like, gross, do not make us entertain ourselves while locked in on a quarantine by unleashing a fucking plague in our Escapism Pastime Universe??? What the fuck, I get that we can’t blame the game devs in 2015 for not forseeing this, but like. Gross, guys. Like, I wouldn’t want to vacation on the Continent anyway but don’t make me responsible for having killed half of it?????) 

So then we could find the man, and you know I don’t know how long it’s supposed to have been since this poor girl got eaten by rats, if her boyfriend is still alive and still pining it can’t have been long but like, all the corpses are dried skeletons except the ones who aren’t, and like. What. What’s a coherent timeline? We don’t need one. 

ANYHOO we bring the guy back with us, and we decide to go find the last few ghosts we might have missed talking to because you get 40 xp every time you see one and that’s a lot of fuckin XP so it’s worth doing but it’s kind of a boring slog to wander around and try to get in exactly the right spot to get the thing to go off and show you... not much by way of clues generally... and then we sort of got stuck in the basement because the forlorn boyfriend was following us around and could not take a hint to get out of the fucking door? and we had to like, dance around until he let us past so he could follow us back up the stairs? I get being clingy my dude, we had to kill several wraiths that were specifically mad at you, but like. Back the fuck off, my man.

Anyhow. It was an annoying, but super-lucrative quest. and in the end, the young man is brave and the horrifying monster is like “KISS ME” and he’s like “Yes I will do that”-- which is surprising given how horrifying the monster is, and Geralt turns his back out of apparent respect, which is sort of cute and sort of sad and sort of funny. 

And he dies, and you feel bad for him, but then you get

400 xp

which is the largest number I’ve ever seen awarded at once like that, holy fuck, really we’re halfway to level 11 already now, Christ almighty. I guess they want to level you up quickly; this is a lvl 6 and having done it earlier would’ve really made some of the other shit we’ve done while underpowered kind of easier?

DF said he felt a little cheap for taking the spoilers, but like, there were not adequate clues in-game. I suppose you could muddle through but like. What the fuck. I guess you probably get a lot of XP for unleashing a horrific plague upon the Continent but I don’t want to find out?

So we went back to Kiera and got another tiny quest from her and DF was like, fine. fine. MM will be mad if we do anything important but this is small and probably quite easy, so we’ll do this one. 

Enroute to tracking down Kiera’s missing mail, a level 7 bandit began chasing us. DF rode on until we were at our objective, watching the little red dot chasing-- the fight music stayed on-- and finally he just got off Roach, turned around, Aarded the guy off his horse, walked over and stabbed him as he lay on the ground, which killed him completely in a single shot. It was pretty epic actually, and was exactly what I’d always hoped leveling up to level 10 would mean.

(That’s not actually a very high level, but it sounds high to me, who has never played a video game.)

(DF is really cavalier about Quen, btw. I’m like, why don’t you use it more? and he was like meh it only saves you from one hit, mostly it’s not worth it and I’d rather cast an active sign with that energy, because I can dodge and I can heal so I’d rather do damage? Fair point but it makes me twitch. yes, I know you can level up Quen and make it more useful but that’s not for a long time yet.)

We also got accosted by the Pellar and given another quest that seems time-sensitive but probably actually isn’t. Like, he says “midnight tonight” and that’s fine but I bet the midnight part is the only bit that really matters. Geralt doesn’t know what day it is. I don’t know what day it is. This is all very #relatable.

Tonight we’re going to see if Kiera wants to bang, but only if MM is available to be wildly amused about it. We stopped, once we’d given Kiera a soft not-right-now to her invitation to find out what was in that box. 

[bomberqueen17]

witcher 3: Stay hydrated, bitch

no, i’m not a gamer. But, Dr. Friend is.

One Saturday in the year 2001, probably, over the summer, I was sleeping in because I’d worked the closing shift at a gas station, and my slumber was disturbed by a weird repeating sound. As I came to wakefulness, I realized it was a cartoon villain voice saying something. I eventually got out of bed and deciphered that it was saying “your creatures need a bigger lair”. I went over and knocked on not-yet-Dr Friend’s door and solemnly told him to build his creatures a bigger fucking lair, and went back to bed. This has passed into history but I still occasionally bother him about building his creatures a lair. Especially at the moment, where in a fit of self-improvement, he rendered the children’s basement playroom unusable and has been procrastinating restoring it to usability by removing carpet from various rooms of the house instead, while the children have been locked inside for five weeks unable to access one of the major locations of the house where they can run wild. DUDE YOUR FUCKING CREATURES NEED A BIGGER FUCKING LAIR, my man, this is no longer just a weird inside joke but actually a deeply relevant situation. Paint the furnace room floor already and quit fucking around!

Anyway. Yesterday he brought down the X-Box console, which he’d had hooked up to the TV in his bedroom but had determined wasn’t really doing him any favors up there, because their daughter’s been refusing to sleep in her own room to the point of them finally setting up a cot for her in the corner of their bedroom, which means he can’t use the Xbox in the evenings, and so he’s been using it during breaks in the middle of the day, and he’s finally conceded that this is both antisocial and unproductive behavior. So now the Xbox is downstairs.

So he set it up and was scrolling around looking for a new game, and I was like “do Witcher! do Witcher! but only 3, that’s the only one where Geralt’s hot and the plot isn’t predicated largely on misogyny!” and he wasn’t particularly listening but I left the room because it was Pajama Time and when I came back down, his pajama-clad wife had just convinced him that he should, in fact, download Witcher 3, because she also wanted to see it. (Pajama Time is an important ritual, y’all.)

So he did, and we both watched in delight as the opening scene features Yennefer’s completely bare ass and also a bunch of gratuitous lingering shots of Geralt’s naked torso. For some reason he decided to do the game on Death March difficulty mode, which seemed ridiculous to me, especially when he then proceeded to spend the intro wandering around the bedroom running into walls and failing to climb bookshelves. MathMom went to bed early and missed out on the other bit of the tutorial, where Dr. F managed to get Geralt’s ass entirely kicked by Vesemir and throw a bomb directly into the middle of Lambert and Eskel’s sparring session. (They seemed remarkably unconcerned.) He kept having to put the controller down and get out his phone and look things up, and then go scroll through all the controller explanation screens to figure out the buttons, and such.

I was extremely dubious about how this Death March Difficulty was going to go, but dutifully passed along a bunch of excited tips from @akilah12902 who has been a fantastic source of Witcher 3 info for me on here this whole time when I’ve wanted to use video game canon to flesh out the worldbuilding in the MDS series, and then all of a sudden when the game really began and a bunch of ghouls swarmed onto the screen, Dr. Friend fairly handily despatched them and proved that he’d really just been fucking around this whole time.  (This is kind of a running thing with Dr. Friend, where he’ll willingly just sort of make an ass of himself for a prolonged period and look like he’s just this whole disaster of a person, and then some situation will arise where he actually needs to be competent and he’ll just casually do that and it’s extremely confusing and I fall for it every time. I have known him twenty years and still am so prone to absolutely falling for it when he pretends to be a fool! In my defense, he’ll maintain the foolish pretense long past what I’d consider to be an emergency, so I’ve been present for a fair amount of actual fuck-ups because he hadn’t turned on his Be A Person mode in time.)

Then he picked a bunch of flowers because i told him he should, and we were both disappointed to discover you can’t pick flowers from horseback. Once we reached the inn, only then did he explore all the inventory screens, and discover that if you want you can un-equip most of Geralt’s clothes.

He put Geralt in underpants, gauntlets, boots, and nothing else, and said, “Look! It’s Pennsic!” but then decided that since clothing gives you a defensive stats boost he’d probably leave it on. He also realized that all the equipment has durability stats too, so conceivably your pants can actually wear out, so that’s a thing to worry about. (I want to know what happens if you actually wear out a pair of pants.)

That’s as far as we got, except for accidentally bodychecking the friendly innkeeper into a wall. Oh, and he was like, ok the ghouls took a big chunk of my health and i need to replenish it and don’t have any obvious healing potions, what do, and after wandering around the tavern for like twenty minutes, he finally tried taking a drink of water and the health bar went “zoop” almost all the way back to the top. “Oh,” he said. ( @akilah12902 responded to my ??? about this with the extremely apt observation “STAY HYDRATED BITCH”.) 

So anyway. I’m actually really hoping that he uses his time painting the furnace room floor so his creatures can have a bigger lair, but maybe I���ll get to be amused by more of Geralt’s hair animations tonight, we’ll find out.

[bomberqueen17]

now it’s time for that leisurely swim in the sewer outlet

ok ok i’ll write up the rest of last night’s play through now. (er. thursday night? idk.) Novigrod, Triss, the sewers, and this epic wyvern fight at the Worst Fucken Timeshare Ever. 

OK. Fast travel to Novigrod. Time for some inventory management and exchanging currency in Hierarch Square. @akilah12902 had cautioned us that if you do certain quests out of order, you get locked out of some others, so-- ok, we can meet Triss, help her with a thing, stick around through ‘the rats thing’, and then leave off and do other stuff before you get trapped into Plot that precludes several juicy sidequests. None of this meant anything to us but like, sure! It’s such a complicated game, it’s probably for the best to just take a hint now and then to avoid disorganization.

Yadda yadda plot cutscene with some ruffians looting Triss’s former house/shop, blah blah no mages allowed in Novigrad, the religious fanatics are burning them, I’m still a little confused about how Radovid (of Redania, isn’t he??) is in charge in the “Free” City of Novigrod (which, according to my understanding, was fought over by Redania and Temeria until it got sick of it and hung out its own shingle right??) but like, who fuckin’ cares, we will find out what we need to within the course of the game, or we will not, and that’s how it is. 

So the Bad Scary Religious Soldiers show up and are like hurr we will burn the witcher if we get a chance and Geralt’s like... ok cool I’ll be over here with my two swords and inhuman stamina, we can make this a playdate. 

Chased some pickpockets and beggars around to try to find out where to look for Triss, and then found her along with one of the Underworld Crime Bosses Who Really Rule This City. (There are apparently four.)

She’s. Ginger, and has her tits mostly out for no reason (including with a cloak failing to cover them very strategically-- interesting choice), and has a Gratuitously Sultry American accent that somehow manages to sound unconvincing. IDK about the voice actress but there was something weirdly like... that’s not her accent... about it. DF had Geralt be... friendly, but not like, eager. 

We had to help Triss recover something that a merchant had, in a panic, thrown into a canal near a sewage outlet. Triss was like “won’t you get it for me Geralt” and Geralt looked at the sewer outlet and said (I am not making this up) “The oils will do wonders for my complexion” and because every version of Geralt is super whipped, just dove right in, swords and all.

We found some decent-ish loot, and nobody was alarmed by a large armored man coated in swords swimming around in their canal. “I’m just a duuuude,” DF sang, navigating. “Swimmin’ in the canaaaalll, wearin’ a bunch a swords, swimmin’ in the canaaaaaall... nothin’ to worry abouuuuut...”  We also found Triss’s bag. Geralt mildly teased her before giving it back for her, but then happily tagged along wherever she was going. 

Again, it wasn’t like he was like, ah if i’m nice to this lady we can bang-- and Triss actually said, Geralt, people take advantage of you when you’re nice, and he was like I know, and she was like I take advantage of you, and he was like is that what you call it, and she was like Time to change the subject. But it really seemed like-- Geralt’s just so goddamned fucking lonely, he’s glad to have someone to talk to whether he wants to fuck her or not. She’s just, a person, who knows him, who isn’t afraid of him, who’ll chat with him and be nice to him, and if he can endanger his own life to help her out, he’s delighted to do so.

So they go to help, ah, the rats thing-- Triss has a contract to help a merchant get the rats out of his warehouse. I blurted “GET PAID UP FRONT” due to an otherwise context-free hint, and sure enough that was a dialogue option and the guy was like “okay!” and handed over the money, and Geralt was like “ok that was weird, they always quibble about that” and Triss was like “can’t afford to be picky” and Geralt was like “this does not seem like it’s going to go smoothly.” But whatever. He was just so happy to talk to a friend; in-game, he hasn’t had a conversation that wasn’t about an ongoing monster attack or the Baron drunkenly sobbing about having beaten his own family mostly to death or bandits demanding to know how many dicks he has. So Triss being nosily like “so are you fucking Yen again?” [and him missing, possibly on purpose, that that’s what she was asking] was clearly such a blessed relief. He just sat there, knowing it was a trap, and leaned on a wall with his arms crossed and shot the shit and had a lovely time.

(”One time to show off my Witcher senses I threw a fork to spear a rat,” he says. “It didn’t work, though.” “Why, did you miss?” Triss asks. “No, of course not,” he says, “it was a champion throw, but-- it was dark, no one could see what I’d done.” You fucking dork.)

So of course the merchant has narked to the Bad Witch Burning Soldier Guys that Triss is here, so they come to take her away to burn her, so Geralt is like “Well, you were looking for trouble earlier, so here I am to make some trouble.”

DF apparently expected this fight to be difficult, so he juiced Geralt up on some insane decoction. As a result, he tore right through the witch-hunters and then was left there sort of awkwardly hopped-up and slightly cockblocked. (Or... not cockblocked, exactly, but whatever it is when you were ready to do some serious killing and there’s nobody to kill.) So he went out and menaced the merchant, and then took a remarkably composed leave of Triss as they parted ways.

“But don’t do the next quest,” DF said. “Okay, the next one is the one about dreaming, we’ll hold off. Hmmm-- oh. I’m still missing a little bit of Griffin armor, so let’s do that.”

Off we went, fast-traveling back to Velen. We went to a random harpy-infested castle we’d found before, killed the lvl 11 endrega warrior at the fast-travel point (again, Geralt was still so amped-up that we just-- fuckin-- shredded the fuckin thing) and found that in the absence of a harpy, a “Student” had moved in and was wandering moodily around the place, seemingly unbothered both by the endrega and by a visibly hopped-up Witcher with a silver sword dripping ichor. “Don’t bother me,” he snapped, as we ran past, sword drawn, looking to see if the harpies had respawned.

We realized that we’d looted the whole castle but missed the crucial bit. A skeleton, a chest, the important things we actually needed. The “student” showed up and wandered around the room we were in while we read the letter. Ah, a guy watched the witcher die, collected his stuff, and then was like “hey what’s in these lil bottles looks tasty” and drank one and pretty straight-off, died. Grim backstory, bruh. But also, who writes down “I am about to try to do a thing, wish me luck, bet I’ll send this letter in a minute!” except for literally everyone in this game. Anyway... More griffin bits acquired.

Then we went to a place called Harpy Feeding Grounds (that’s literally what the fast-travel signpost says), and it immediately proved to actually be the truth. Roach bucked Geralt off, and then got in the fuckin way for the rest of the fight. Harpies are easy enough to fight-- they kind of swarm you, but if you Aard one down then you can oneshot-kill them. Unless, of course, Roach walks between you and your target, and scoops herself under you, so that as you try to jump on the harpy, instead you mount the horse and she carries you off somewhere. 

Which was annoying, but Geralt managed to get back off the fucking horse and finish off the rest of the apparent harpies. From there we wandered down toward the shore-- there was a lighthouse we were meant to make for, but a little ramble first, what’s the harm? oop that’s, well that’s pretty steep-- yikes-- well, this is a less-leisurely ramble, but -- A new marker pops up-- Guarded Treasure-- oh good, who’s guarding it?

Well, a level 14 basilisk. Hm, Geralt’s pretty hopped-up, how bad could it--

RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY!  Awkwardly, the not-so-leisurely ramble means we’re trying to scramble back up a semi-sheer rockface to escape this fucking basilisk that is just Too Spicy for Wee Precious Geralt at level 11, so it was not easy, but we made it.

A bit of scrambling later, the harpies were back but Geralt could handle those.  (Shittiest vacation destination ever.) We made our way down to the drawbridge, which was raised, to get out to the lighthouse. I’d looked at the quest online and it said you had to climb down the rocks to the shore and swim in through an underwater cave, so I mentioned that. “Hm,” DF said, and jumped off the bridge. “No!” I said, “won’t that kill you?” “It’s water,” he said. “Water’s hard!” I said. He hit the water, lost a tiny bit of health, and then was fine.  “I kind of don’t like having to look stuff up,” he said, making Geralt swim around.  “I get that,” I said, “but you probably would have figured this bit out. And the earlier bits, you probably could have figured out.” “I don’t think I’d’ve figured out the B dodge,” he said. “Some games manage to make the tutorials more comprehensive, or-- well, like the first quests, kind of organically introduce all the new things that you need to know, as part of what you’re doing.”“It’s a really complicated game, though,” I said. (Throughout all of this, Geralt is swimming around and crossbowing Drowners.) “I just don’t think it’d be possible to introduce everything without having a really mind-numbing tutorial.”  “Fair,” he said, and surfaced into a cave. Most of the loot in the abandoned lighthouse was water. Which is hilarious. “Well, like, bottled water,” DF said. “That’s better, everyone knows that.” “It’s like Fiji or some shit,” I said. 

We worked up through the abandoned lighthouse, finding random bits and bobs. Finally we got to the top. “There’s supposed to be a level 14 wyvern,” DF says, proving that he Googles things too. 

“There it is,” I said. 

“I don’t know if I can fight it from up here,” DF says. The top of the tower is about the size of an Yrden circle, which he has an extremely difficult time staying inside of while fighting. He gets the crossbow out, and knocks the thing down a couple of times, gets it good and mad.

And then proceeds to fight it from the roof of the tower, somehow without ever *quite* falling off. It’s a near thing a couple of times, and the thing flies away and then comes back and flies away and then comes back. Fortunately apparently wyverns don’t breathe fire. 

All of a sudden, the thing falls, and the loot it leaves behind on dying appears on the roof. 

“I can’t believe that worked,” DF said. “Oh my God,” I said. “I can’t believe that actually-- that worked!” he said, and picked up the loot, and picked up the loot from the dead body that had been lying on top of the tower that hadn’t been lootable before. “Oh my god,” I said, “how the heck-- that was amazing!” “I can’t believe it worked,” DF said, and turned

and fell off the tower

to his death

(The worst thing about falling deaths for Geralt is when he’s hopped up and can take a lot of damage, because he dies in stages on the way down as he hits various objects and takes damage, and there’s always this little oh my gosh will he make it? frisson, and then BOOM    💀 You Are Dead)

“Fuck,” we both said, staring at the reload screen.

“Am I gonna have to do that fight again,” he said.

“I-- I can’t believe that just happened,” I said. ... “Though, that is possibly the most you thing ever, to win that amazing fight and then immediately trip down the fucking stairs.”

“Story of my life,” says DF, a man who once, in undergrad, from across a room, tripped me, actually up a flight of stairs, spraining my ankle, did I mention from across a room, so like. I’m not just saying this, the man’s spectacularly clumsy sometimes.

Blessedly, upon reload, the wyvern was still dead. Huzzah, thank fuck.

We climbed carefully down the lighthouse tower and finally managed to find the relevant chest full of Important Shit (Griffin Silver Sword), and lowered the drawbridge so we could cross back to the mainland to pick up the fast travel marker at Harpy Feeding Grounds.

Thence, returned to Novigrod, tried to find a blacksmith and accidentally entered into a whole quest about a blacksmith turned dumpling-maker and realized that’s uhh level 24 so that’s getting backburnered for now. (I finally googled Witcher 3 blacksmith novigrod where and discovered there was one literally next to Hierarch Square that we could just... go to.) 

At the blacksmith, we finally were able to get everything we needed to get the full set of Griffin Witcher Gear, and now Geralt looks moderately professional and a little less like a demented ragpicker.

Psst get him a decent haircut, I said, and DF laughed at me.

Suitably attired, we signed off for the night. 

[bomberqueen17]

he actually equipped Quen on this one

Let me set the scene for you, in the household where I’ve been riding out this isolation period. DF, my Doctor Friend, with whom I attended university as an undergrad (I met him on his 18th birthday completely prostrate under a table having had two whole beers on his own) works in the local hospital. MM, MathMom, his wife, has been my friend since high school; we met in 1995, as near as we can remember. She is an engineer by training, a math teacher by experience, and is at home currently with their two children, Boy, who is 7, and Girl, who is 5. When schools closed, I grew worried that the children would go even more feral, and would eat MM while DF was stuck at work for endless shifts during the pandemic, so after I got furloughed, I came out here (about an hour’s drive away from my house) and have been here mostly ever since. 

So there’s the recap; I just felt like I hadn’t gone over that for a while and there’s some new folks and Tumblr doesn’t make searching the tags easy. Or, like, going through someone’s archives in an organized fashion.

Anyway-- the scene. In the family room is a big television, and the couches are arranged in a kind of L around the square of the room. DF has a rolling chair for gaming that he keeps quite close to the TV, and pulls it out and sits up there with his feet propped up basically on the entertainment center. And then MM and I sit on the couches and usually do embroidery or bullshit on our phones or whatever while he’s playing.

But, for the first however long it takes the kids to fall asleep, DF will play a fast-paced FPS shooter called Warframe, and a lot of time Girl keeps coming down the stairs for an hour, an hour and a half, oh i need a drink, mommy can you help me find this stuffed toy, mommy i was going through your closet but i can’t reach your good jewelry can i have it, mommy i am worried that a platypus might sting me, mommy -- in short, i don’t want to go to sleep and am resentful that i’m not allowed to just be involved in everything you adults are doing. SO, we have to sit there and watch the Glitter Robots Game (it’s horribly gory but all the “gore” is robots and looks like glitter so it’s not as obvious even though I think it’s scarier than the Witcher if you pay the slightest attention to the worldbuilding-- but the kids don’t, and he plays it with the volume really low so the gunfire’s not so jarring when they’re around, so it works fine.) until the little pitter-patter-feet down the stairs stop happening.

Sometimes though he gets kind of sucked in to a mission or something-- it’s multiplayer and he doesn’t want to leave a mission in the middle of it and so on, so it can be hard to get everything to line up. Some nights we despair, as it get super late and we’re still Glitter Robots-ing. But, on nights when he’s just launched into it, inevitably a child will come down and be like “WHAT IS THAT.” Boy now asks every night if we’re going to “play the scary game” after he’s in bed. .... so glitter robots it is. 

So tonight we didn’t get much Witchering time, but, we did a bit. 

All this is prompted by my having copy-pasted my notes on Friday night’s gaming session into this window and it opens with 

ah it's the witcher 3 loadscreen, all is not lost

We opened with a little scroll through the inventory to see what we needed to look for and what we could make now. We’re only bisongrass and bear fat short of Enhanced Beast Oil, which maybe we don’t need for gameplay but we absolutely need for inside jokes. This led to a rumination on whether it’d be better to go hunt down a bear, or buy bear fat somewhere. Sometimes you can dismantle things you already have into other components, but you have to go to a blacksmith’s shop and be in the shopping interface to do this. The things you can dismantle into other things don’t always make sense, either.

“Well,” MM said, explaining the blacksmith thing, “obviously, you need an anvil in order to make linen into silk.”

(Throughout this, DF was eating a bag of Cheetos and kept missing the buttons he was pressing because he was trying not to use the Cheeto-powder fingers. It was the most Gamer thing he has ever done and it was hilarious, but hard to recap. For further scene-setting, he is actually not a stereotypically gamer-looking dude, not that there’s really a particular way that gamers look, but y’know. It was just funny because he was doing this delicate sort of pinkies-out Cheeto eating with the xbox controller carefully held out of the way, and was completely failing at keeping things tidy. In the morning I found the empty Cheeto bag on the floor in the family room where food isn’t allowed (I’m sure he’d left it on the coffee table), and told Boy, who was watching keenly, that clearly the mice had dragged it in here, as no adult would ever violate the sanctity of not eating in the family room.)

DF realized that potion stocks were low so he had Geralt meditate to replenish them. I hadn’t really considered it; of course in any kind of storytelling, Geralt would meditate in a carefully-chosen situation, but in-game it really doesn’t matter, so Geralt meditated in the middle of the street at an intersection in Novigrad, right on the cobblestones. He stood up and there was a guardsman kind of standing there watching him bemusedly (not really, he was an NPC and thus was totally vacant and running an idle animation but it really looked like he was watching in bemusement as this odd sword-bedecked man sat in the street staring at nothing), and he was like “What” and ran off. 

basically the first thing that happened is this halfling was like “pssst you wanna buy contraband magical stuff?” Geralt was like “what have you been looting the homes of burned mages?” and the halfling’s like “yeah you want some?” and Geralt was like “you’re a ghoul” and the halfling’s like “can’t have unsecured magical shit just lying around, right? anyway do you want some?” but then the guards show up and he’s like “ah shit tell no one you saw me!” and runs away. The guards come over to Geralt and are like “why did that halfling run away, tell us!” and I was like oh fuck the police but for some reason DF was like, no, I’m gonna snitch, that guy was a ghoul, and told the cops the guy was selling contraband. WTF man, I thought you were cool. And we had JUST been saying “ah we need to find someplace to buy magic shit” so like. I don’t understand this decision, but you can’t really play a video game by committee.

We had been killing time so we could go back and do fencing lessons with Rose var Attre, in the hopes of that being a useful plot-related quest, but the quest thing stubbornly didn’t update. “Go to Rose Var Attre’s residence tomorrow,” it still said, even though it was now 8 in the morning of the following day, and no arrow to guide us to her residence appeared. 

So we wandered a bit, picked up a weird little one-- a halfling and a man were arguing and a guard was super fed up of their shit and was like “oy just hire that witcher, he’ll figure it out”, “it” being, apparently, that there was a monster in the warehouse. Geralt was like “fine” and went in, and there’s a nekker in the warehouse. He despatched it handily, but like... those are monsters that live in nests and tunnel underground and are always in packs, wtf? A little searching uncovered a cage, which the creature had clearly been transported in. Also, the cage bars had been recently cut, freeing the creature.

So Geralt went back out and reported all that to the guard, who was like “ok i don’t care, we’re arresting both of you and torturing the truth out of you” and Geralt was like welp my work here is done, took his like $20 and left. 

(I genuinely have no idea how much the coins in this game are supposed to be worth. I also don’t think anyone really does. I’m just making up what the amounts are, I don’t really write it down.)

As Fencing Lessons still stubbornly refused to update, we hared off into the countryside. DF has a kind of little personally-assigned quest, where he checks all the noticeboards he can see on the map-- once you’ve checked them and taken anything Witcher-specific, they disappear from the map, and only light up again if something new spawns for them. So if he’s got a spare moment among Plot, he goes and clears out noticeboards.

We went to one in a little hamlet called Cunny of the Goose, which is weird nonsense-- isn’t a cunny a cunt?? I don’t object to the word, it’s a fine old English word of Germanic origin and venerable heritage, but as an experienced poultry slaughterhouse worker I am here to inform you that geese, like all birds, do not have cunts, so I do not understand the name of this village.

Anyhow. We picked up some weird little quests and went through the inventory tab again. The endless cycle of this game is, like-- ok. We need albedo as a component to this potion we need. We can craft albedo, but we need White Gull to do so. To craft White Gull, we need both cherry cordial and mandrake cordial. Shit, we had cherry cordial but we sold it. Well, can we buy more? Inns have cordials, sure. 

Ha, the inn at Cunny of the Goose does not have any kind of cordial but it does have fisstech, so now we know where to get that. (We have fisstech, we have a lot of fisstech, as we can neither consume nor dismantle it. DF has decided to save it, along with his purely-decorative swords; he has those all tucked away in the stash. And that’s it. Which is hilarious to imagine-- someone finally opens up Geralt’s stash to find out more about this creature of legend and it’s just low-level but cool-looking relic swords, and like ten kilos of fisstech. Which, if you’re new to this game, is literally just cocaine.) 

Geralt is now four points (out of 1000) away from level 15. We finally just Googled where Rose Var Attre’s house is and went there, since the quest wouldn’t update. Talking to the guards gave a small handful of XP and so he leveled up to 15 just from basically saying “hi is the lady of the house in” “no she’s taking a walk but she said if you came by you should go find her there” “ok” *big choral “aaaahhhh” noise, Level 15 appears on the screen* Amazing.

Anyhow, Fencing Lessons was kind of dumb-- Rosa is a spoiled-brat noblewoman who wants to play games, makes Geralt fight her with live steel even though he really doesn’t want to do that and isn’t prepared for it; DF got hung up on the controls and really wasn’t prepared for her to just attack him so she hit him three times and then it went into a cutscene where she was like HA I HAVE BEAT YOU, and Geralt was like listen lady this isn’t really how you learn fencing? also I could have killed you, maybe don’t? and she’s like turn around i gotta fix my undies, and he’s like what but turns around, and then she runs away for some reason? is he supposed to chase her? Fine. He tracks her across the bridge to a village where the villagers have accosted her and are like “oh we’re going to murder this Fancy Lady from a people who are trying to subjugate us” and Geralt has to Axii them into submission to save her. She’s like ah when Nilfgaard takes these lands I will personally have those men killed and Geralt’s like why you gotta be such a jerk about this and she’s like clearly you do not understand how our honor and morals work! and he’s like damn right, go fuck yourself but politely, and that’s... it. That’s the whole quest. 

So... fed up with Novigrad, we went back to take care of a Velen quest, Swamp Thing, which was level 12 and had to be take care of before we level up inappropriately. Of course, we picked it up so long ago we no longer remember anything about it, but whatever. It’s a... ah, it’s a foglet, so we checked and discovered that we did indeed have moon dust bombs. OK sure. 

DF actually equipped Quen for this one, which he rarely bothers with, but like, foglets are insubstantial and materialize and hit you hard too fast for a parry, so Quen is basically required for this. 

With Quen, though, it turned out DF is twitchy enough and Geralt powered-up enough that the foglet was actually not terribly difficult to defeat, so we never did use any of the moondust bombs. Just-- hit it a bunch of times, and put Quen back on periodically, and that was that. It wasn’t terribly difficult, though I clearly remember the first foglet a while ago with wee precious flower prince Geralt at like, level four, and how it killed us over and over and over again. 

So. Something to be said for leveling up, as it happens. 

We rode around Velen sort of aimlessly after that-- not really aimlessly, trying to clear up the map. We found a bunch of under-leveled stuff that would’ve been good to have found at like, level 6 or whatever, but interspersed with it were things like... oh here’s a Guarded Treasure, let’s see what we find. Ah, a chest full of goodies. Picked up the loot, and wandered for a moment, and then abruptly a Biglhag materialized. Level 20. Run away! Run away from the big ol’ hag! I mean. maybe we could take on a level 20 something. But like, why? We already have what she was guarding.

(We abandoned any thought of going back to Novigrad for Plot because the next Plot is Sigi Reuven’s bathhouse, and MM got sleepy and went to bed and we could not possibly take Geralt to a bathhouse and be treated to his lovingly-rendered bare chest without having MM along for the ride.) 

One thing about Velen, the fight music there is this guy just sort of hollering, and we had sort of forgotten about it, and kind of hadn’t missed it... 

We found the big central encampment of the invading Nilfgaardian forces and cleared out two semi-little quests for them. There was a cutscene where a soldier updates us on the injured woman from the intro level-- the griffin at White Orchard had injured a woman and as a kind of eases-you-in-to-potion-making, the quest kind of guides you through making Swallow (healing potion) for the first time to give her some to see if it helps, and now this guy updates you that it kept her alive but she’s catatonic. He says he doesn’t know whether to bless you for keeping her alive or curse you for denying her a death with dignity, and Geralt’s like you think I don’t think about that shit all the time?? and that’s that for that encounter. 

Anyway. we also wandered around in the swamp, and lied to a mother and said her dead son had died with honor instead of deserting and being executed for it. We also found that a Nilfgaardian patrol that had vanished had been killed by a wyvern, which was what the quartermaster was paying you to find out, and so we had to fight the wyvern, but then we also found out-- well, it was confusing, we followed a bunch of signs around and were like okay obviously we’re meant to be making a deduction here but what is the deduction, and I finally Googled it and was like oh, this is the deduction, so we went back to the camp and in the dialogue options Geralt’s like “so that patrol was out there executing prisoners of war”, and that’s what we were supposed to have been realizing.

Anyhow, needing to google it to figure out what the fuck was supposed to be going on also meant that I could advise DF that it only meant that either Geralt could get all high-dudgeony and refuse to take the guy’s coin for having done a job of work for him-- what, we don’t make war criminals pay their freelancers?-- and get a handful more XP but not much? or we can say “fuck you, pay me” and get money and almost as much XP from this guy we’re so mad at. 

So we did that, because taking money from war criminals to pay you for work you’ve already done for them seems more ethical to me than just saying “no, I’m so mad at you I did your work for free”. like, wtf man. no. get paid, honey. 

Anyway, it was time to put the controller down for the night. 

[bomberqueen17]

In W3 All Boats Are Motorboats

We did some Witcher 3 on the 4th of July, which means I can finally get off my ass and write up the playthrough from the last night I spent at DF and MM’s house before going to the farm this last time. Shh listen it was the end of an era and i couldn’t bear to let it go. Also I didn’t have time at the farm to write it up. But here is a short and rather old Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt writeup from early June that I am only now converting from my notes to a proper writeup, to clear the way to write up the last one. Ha.

So when last we left off, Geralt had killed Whoreson Jr., been assigned by Radovid to go find Phillippa Ergonomics, and had equipped himself an absolutely fucktacular piece of Fantasy Nonsense Swordcraft. 

(I’ve discovered, btw, that Tumblr is garbage but Dreamwidth actually keeps your tagged posts together, so if you want to find and review all my Wee Precious Flower Prince Geralt Witcher 3 playthroughs, they are neatly archived, advertisement- and algorithm-free, at their tag on my Dreamwidth via crossposts. now, the formatting’s fucked, but nobody really cares about my gratuitous use of italics anyway, so.)

It was the middle of the night and there were bards performing near Hierarch Square, and nobody was listening to them because it was the middle of the night, so DF took Geralt over there to at least stand there so they wouldn’t be alone the whole time.

While there, he decided that we should do the Black Pearl quest, which requires going to Skellige, because it would drop off the end of getting point rewards pretty soon if we didn’t. So we fast-traveled to Skellige. 

We stole a boat. This seemed fine and reasonable until several level 19 ekhidnas, which as far as I can tell are just... sirens... decided to be on the boat. They knocked Geralt out of the boat and then he was in the water. It was a huge pain in the dick. Geralt climbed up onto a rock in the water, and attempted to fight the ekhidnas from this rock, which he couldn’t really be on properly, and there was all this scrambling and clambering, but it turns out ekhidnas, even overpowered ones, do die pretty easy. 

We discovered that if Geralt is in thigh-deep water, the animation makes him walk around with his arms held out to the sides just like a little old lady in a water aerobics class.

We killed the ekhidnas and looted them, and then found the corpse of a guy with a key on him so we could loot the locked trunk on this rock, which like... okay... it was fine, it wasn’t that exciting. Finally we managed to get back onto the boat, and sailed on. 

There’s this really obnoxious effect when you’re on a boat, where the “camera” pivots to be behind the boat watching Geralt sail it, and gets splashed with water for no reason. They’re motorboats, all the boats; they don’t move in any way that a sail would make the slightest bit of sense, and they’re driven just like a motorboat, even though there’s no attention paid to making that plausible. Listen they’re just all magically motorboats. 

And, equally magically, there’s suddenly a camera lens, to get splattered with water? It’s obnoxious.

Anyway we find our guy. This quest, see, is an older man who wants you to help him get his wife a rare black pearl, and these pearls grow in oyster beds in this particular bit of Skeillige. As the man talks more it’s like... he’s kind of a retiree, see... he was in the army... fought in some battles... 

“So,” DF said, a little dubiously, “he’s a VA patient.”

And the quest is, basically, do you have the potion that lets you breathe underwater forever, or do you want to do it the hard way? Sigh, the hard way. 

The water’s really fucking deep, which is annoying. And it’s hard to tell what you’re looking at, so at first we just wound up with a shitton of buckthorn. 

Amusingly, every time Geralt surfaces, the default camera angle just frames his ass the whole way up. Gratuitous butt shots all the way. And then we got super annoyingly beseiged by sirens, which fucking suck. Why can they fly!!! IDK. 

But we got the pearl, and then swam pell-mell back to shore because of fucking course there were Drowners attacking our quest-giver-retiree guy. At least drowners can’t fly, and since there’s no friendly fire, our pal is fireproof so we could just igni the whole beach with impunity.

On our way back to the fast travel point we sworded a snow hare to eat it, but while it showed as a killed enemy icon, there was nothing lootable. So we sworded another one, and again it was in vain. You can commit bunny crimes, but you will not be rewarded. Alas. 

Randomly we found a blacksmith, and got excited that maybe he was the Master Armorer that the dwarf’s wife at the Baron’s compound thingy in Velen was going on about, but no, he wasn’t, he was just an amateur. Weirdly, he was obsessed with Dandelion. We made some crack about how he’s held Dandelion’s Achievements in both hands... for a while after that, MM kept repeating “... achievements” in differing tones of emphasis, to great hilarity.

At that point the game sort of weirdly froze with Geralt making the polite hmm are you going to tell me anything useful face at the blacksmith. After a while, DF realized that the dialogue options were present, but invisible, so he managed to randomly highlight and pick one, sight unseen, and it got us out of the weird frozen scene. 

So we got back to Novigrad and the guy paid Geralt for the pearl, and we got the punchline, that he wanted this pearl because his wife has dementia and he thought it might remind her who he was. Very sad, but also, like, he paid us so that’s good. 

DF, tiredly, saved the game, as it was time for bed, and then threw Geralt off the dock into like, nine feet of water, to do some water aerobics and see how long it took him to drown. He didn’t really have the gumption to make him drown, though, so he just quit the game with Geralt down there, which we then forgot about so I’m gonna spoiler it and say that a month later when I came back (last night, as I write this recap, so that I can then write last night’s recap, LOL) we loaded the game and DF was like “what the fuck why is Geralt underwater with half his breath gone” so it turns out the game saved again, LOL. Anyway, that’s enough for now, and I’m glad to get this out of my drafts; I was too sad to write it when I thought maybe it was going to be the last one, but now I know I have at least one more. 

I don’t think life’s going back to normal but after having gotten stuck at the farm waiting for COVID test results I just was having visions of not getting back out west at all, and that crisis is past, and well, anyway. Good night, and we’ll come back to this again.

[bomberqueen17]

defecating to the sunrise

So I went back and tagged all of my Witcher 3 recaps with “wee precious flower prince geralt” since that seems to be an ongoing theme, and I wanted to be able to find them all again too. 

DF had an office day yesterday so he was home early and spent some time in the afternoon Warframing, so he fired up Witcher 3 while MM was still putting the kids to bed. He figured he had a bunch of boring quest-grinding to do and she wouldn’t miss anything.

But that meant that as we were talking to a man about a cart full of plague victims, the 7-year-old came down to ask for medicine for his stuffy nose. I noticed him first, as the screen had just gone to a cutscene; Geralt standing there looking disapprovingly at a man standing next to a cart full of bodies, glowering skeptically at him, and the 7-year-old boy, standing in the passageway from the kitchen, watching it in entrancement, a faint line of confusion between his eyebrows. “Kid,” I said, “what do you need?” “My nose is stuffy,” he said, still staring entranced at the brightly-colored video game screen. “You gotta burn that cart,” Geralt growled at the carter. (Geralt knows about germ theory. HM) “Then get a stuffie,” DF said, not having heard him amidst the sounds of getting out of his chair to physically interpose his own 6′1″ body between the child and the unskippable cut scene. But it’s a really large television, so this wasn’t super effective. “No, my nose,” Boy said. “What are you watching? Who’s that?” “Come on,” DF said, putting the controller down and leading Boy to the kitchen, to give him a completely placebo-level underdose of allergy medication, which, spoiler alert, completely sorted him for the evening.  (Boy is, after all, the original Flower Prince; he’s very sensitive, and it’s sweet and lovely but occasionally you want to kind of grab him by the shoulders and intone furiously not all sensation is pain, child, it is okay to exist in a body but we do not do this very often because it isn’t particularly effective. But it’s true, child, it’s true.)

(behind the cut: hide and seek, and a reply to a reply about a bookverse allusion. this is kind of a long meandery one, i always mean to make these more concise but i’m just having too much fun. sorry.)

Anyway, we ran around and killed a random wyvern and also cleared out a monster den full of wraiths that proved to hold a level 11 ekimmara and the grave of a guy named Witcher George, and the diagrams to make some higher-level armor. Also, it proved to have a cave full of explosive poisonous gas, which we figured out by walking in there with a lit torch and then flying the fuck back out, on fire, when it exploded. (Geralt makes fantastic “Argh!” noises when this happens, and occasionally intones, “Ow!” or “Shit!” really clearly, which is unintentionally hilarious and makes me feel bad for laughing.)

(Ah, a note for Netflix-only fans: In the games, Geralt has an American accent. All the Witchers do. The villagers all have various terrible impressions of semi-British-ish accents, but all of the Witchers have very whitebread American accents, and it’s kind of entertainingly weird if you pay attention. Geralt’s accent is invisible-to-Americans dialect; Vesemir has a Generic Old Man American accent, and Lambert sounds kind of Californian but mostly in tone of voice. Eskel hasn’t talked enough for me to really place him, but it’s fair to say none of them are supposed to sound like anything in particular to an American-- it just registers as words. I mean, I guess I get it-- Witchers don’t sound like the locals-- but it’s weird.)

At this point, given enough space to work in, a second to oil his blade, and a single application of the Quen sign [optional], DF can kill a level 7 wraith in about six seconds. So, to those of you wondering why this insane motherfucker wanted to play on Death March mode, that’s why. Sometimes he casts an Yrden, but he hasn’t leveled it up and the initial-level Yrden sign is so ineffective as to be entirely useless, so he does it for the aesthetics occasionally but it doesn’t actually affect the outcome of the fight at all.

The level 11 ekimmara, which is a sort of vampire, took a couple of minutes but it tends not to pursue, which is great because then there’s time to heal from the damage before re-engaging. The only time enemies are really a problem is when there’s 1) more than 2 of them and 2) not enough space to roll away. (Higher-level boss creatures are not included in this analysis.) (And, again, I note, I could not even navigate through the fucking menu options to turn the Xbox ON in the first place, so absolutely 0 of this actually includes me, and I’m just saying “we” for the aesthetic. I am on this ride solely to provide background lore and color commentary, and I rely on MathMom for a lot of the color commentary.)

“We need Beast Oil,” DF said, and not three minutes later we came upon a treasure guarded by a level twelve bear, which was super super super annoying but bears are slow enough that you can just kind of run around and hit them and run away and Axii them and come back and hit them and hit them and run away and Axii them and so on and so forth. 

“Dumpling, crunch crunch!” DF chirped at one point, and when I was like what he was like “I’m eating a dumpling to regen health, that’s not like, my cute name for the bear or whatever.” He was out of Raw Meat, which is what he usually puts in that slot. Fortunately, having killed the bear, he was soon replenished with additional Raw Meat. 

Then, while moving on, we met another bear, ran away from it, fell off a cliff directly onto it, and still managed to escape without fighting it. Victory!  When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled I mean, we could’ve fought the bear, that one was only lvl 6, but like, we didn’t need to fight the bear, so why fight the bear, it’s just doing bear shit in the woods and like, we don’t need to get into it with that bear except for having landed on it. Sorry, bear. 

We also took out some bandits and in the loot they dropped was a bunch of Fisstech. “I’m just gonna see how much fisstech I can collect,” DF said. 

“Can you snort it?” I asked.

He poked through inventory. “No,” he said, “it’s not interact-with-able at all. But wow, I have a lot of it.” Envision, if you will, a spectacularly unwashed Witcher with muttonchops and metallic gold boots running around the wilderness with like two kilos of coke on him. Why the fuck not! Maybe you can use it for a quest. Maybe you can sell it. Who knows: we’re just gonna keep collecting it.

Anyway. Some running around later, MM joined us, just as we did some bullshit little thing that pushed us over the threshhold to level up! to level 8!

“I got a new slot!” DF said excitedly, and MM and I snorted and giggled until he gave us a dirty look and went back to his point allocation nerdout. 

Scrolling through the open quests, DF noticed Ladies of the Woods. “Kiera gave you Ladies of the Woods,” I said. 

“Mm,” MathMom said, glancing up from her sewing project. “I think they call those... isn’t that a euphemism for scabies?”

Anyway. We went to do Ladies of the Woods. It was dusk as we arrived, and we saw that there were donuts on the ground. “DOn’t trust them,” @akilah12902 said (I generally livetext her about the playthroughs, which is both amusing at the time and also gives me notes i can write these recaps with, multitasking yay!) and I was like I mean, it doesn’t let you pick them up. There were also... strings of donuts hanging from the trees? DF tried to light a torch so we could look at them better but it wouldn’t let him choose the torch in the selection wheel so he Aarded the strings like five times before giving up.

“Those are human ears,” @akilah12902 eventually explained, which, well, okay, yeah, that’s a good reason not to trust the donuts, but also that’s a lot of fucking ears. Like... we got that this was a creepy swamp, though.

We met our first Water Hag. Oh, it was big and ugly and had like, a posse of Drowners with it, but like. They really don’t like fire, and conveniently, Geralt can make fire with his hands and throw it, and like. Yeah. Igni, it turns out, is super-effective for Water Hags. 

Then we met a bunch of kids. The kids were sort of... I mean, kids, but sort of creepy? (Also they had the voice actor just doing a really high voice for the littler kid and like. not convincing. cute attempt, and probably for the best not to actually hire a tiny child to say lines with shite and arse in them [he does get put in time-out for that], but like.) Geralt asks them about Ciri, an ashen-haired lass. ”no lasses here,” said one kid, to which one of the girls was like “what am I then?” and the kid’s like “lasses have tits, you don’t” and then there’s a whole diatribe about tits, which is fairly hilarious coming out of this tiny child. Geralt’s expression remains politely incredulous throughout, which is my favorite expression of his, and one he wears a lot when he talks to little kids who, I might mention, are never ever afraid of him, even when the adults around them seem to be. 

Gran puts Foul-Mouthed Kid in time out but the thing that kid had been so foul-mouthed about was some... one or thing named Johnny, who’d told him about an ashen-haired lass. So Geralt needs to talk to Foul-Mouthed Kid, but Gran won’t let him. The other kids are like, make a deal with us and maybe we’ll help you.

I was like DF you must absolutely do what those kids want because I want to know what they’re going to make you do

and the answer is THEY WANT YOU TO PLAY HIDE AND SEEK

and Geralt, sure enough, straight-ahead just plays hide and seek with the kids, puts his hands over his face and counts and doesn’t peek. But then of course, he’s got Witcher senses, so he tracks the kids to their hiding places, and they grumble about it but keep their end of the deal, and Foul Mouthed Kid tells you all he knows about Johnny, who... probably isn’t a child, and maybe isn’t real. 

“I think these kids aren’t real,” DF theorized. “I think maybe one of them’s real and the others are imaginary.”

“I think it’s a cult,” MM said. 

“I think Johnny’s dead,” I guessed. 

We were all wrong; Johnny’s a godling, blue and two and a half feet high with giant yellow eyes, and you have to go find his voice before he can tell you anything, but once you kill some harpies and get him a fancy little bottle with an exclamation point on it he gets his voice back and swears a lot, which is entertaining. And yes, he has seen Ciri; she interrupted his morning shit, which annoyed him (”Defecating to the sunrise,” he says, waxing rhapsodic. He is truly, genuinely, flagrantly eccentric, which, I mean, good for him). 

So he intercedes for you with Gran, really puts himself out-- I’ve done you favors, and never asked for payment, but I’m asking you now, help this witcher, because otherwise he’ll bother me. Which is big of him, as Geralt helped him out and insisted on help in return but hasn’t actually threatened him or harassed him, really. Johnny’s putting it on with Gran, to get Geralt what he needs, and Geralt’s expression indicates that he’s pleasantly surprised at this.

Anyway-- Gran relents and invokes the crones for Geralt, and they prove to be extremely creepy. Geralt asks them after Ciri and they’re like “ohh yes she’s very pleasing, you’re after that hm” and he’s like “no umm that’s my daughter” and they’re like “why should that stop you” and he’s like “uh-- no-- that’s fuckin’ gross, ladies” and they’re like “suit yourself” and give him a silver dagger to take to an alderman about a quest to do so that in return they’ll give him the information he wants about Ciri.

Geralt literally rolls his eyes at this, but it’s par for the course-- nobody can fuckin tell you shit you need to know without making you jump through hoops first. They see a Witcher, they want that Witcher to do them a thing. Nobody cares about his lost daughter, nobody cares if he’s got a sob story, he’s just got to listen to theirs and solve their goddamned problems. 

But when it’s kids who want to play a game, he plays the fuckin’ game, and if it’s an old lady who needs her pan back, he gets her the fuckin’ pan, and if it’s a fisstech dealer who then turns into a bandit and loots refugees, well okay then now it’s time for swording, asshole, but up to that Geralt will pretty much just put up with anything. 

We got as far as the conversation with the alderman (I’m spelling that wrong and don’t give a shit, guys) but MM had gone to bed so we did too, and then I stayed up way too late avoiding figuring out the climax of the second chapter I just thought of for Fugitive so now I’m a zombie today. (I’ve learned more about Axii and have thought of a super angsty way to use it! I’m terrible.)

In closing, here’s a response to the writeup about the swineherding quest:

kaijyuu reblogged your post and added:

risking the possibility of being that person, the ‘curse someone cast with their feet’ bit is most likely a reference to the dragon hunt in the novels, where yennefer is tied up and unable to use her hands for gestures, so she throws spells with her feet, turning guardsmen into various animals, which is actually fucking great.(what is not so fucking great is that she is lacking a shirt, dandelion is creepily staring, and there are some very uncomfortable comments made by the dwarves– sapkowski is very obviously A Man, and some parts of the novels are very on par with the baron questline) #the witcher#oh boy there are some moments i would like to unread

Mm y’know, sometimes I’m just glad that the moment I idly looked at the library to see if any of the Witcher books were available, there was a huge waitlist and I decided I did not need to read them. Occasionally I’m like ah there might be something cool in there nobody’s told me about, but then I’m like... no. No, I don’t think I’m really missing that much.

[bomberqueen17]

succubus

“This is the last session we’ll have for this,” I said, as DF got out the Xbox controller and booted up the Witcher 3. [I am writing this well after the fact, if it wasn’t obvious.]

“I mean,” MM said, “if we do it without you I’d have to take notes, wouldn’t I?”

“Yes,” I said.

“No, no,” DF said, “I’m fairly certain that Geralt will have no problem simply resuming his hard drive slumber in your absence.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

DF shrugged. “The game is from 2015,” he said, “it’s not like it’s going to suddenly be out of date.”

“Fair point.”

So, we settled down for one more session. On the docket: Honor Among Thieves, and a random collection of what we’re starting to term Chicken Sandwich Bandits because so many of them have a chicken sandwich as their loot.

Well, I hadn’t really understood that the reason Dandelion got it into his head to rob Sigi Reuven’s credit union was to bankroll some operation of Whoreson Jr.’s, in part to pay for the repair of the phylactery Ciri had. Whoreson requested that specifically for the chaos it would cause the other three crime lords of Novigrad, surely, but Dandelion was only working for him to help Ciri.

Anyway, it seems somewhat overly-complicated.

Meanwhile, Geralt is out for a jog, apparently, running through the countryside doing odds and ends kinds of quests. At the moment, the Apiarian Phantom, which is some kind of monster that is randomly freezing people to death, along with some beehives. 

The beehives are all owned by a family of... halflings? Related to the one that Geralt freed from the upstairs of Junior’s casino, apparently, and one of them has a beat-up face, but is not the same guy. IDK man. 

It’s weirdly idyllic, we’re picking berbercane and wolfsbane in a pleasant meadow while looking for clues. And here come drowners in mass quantities, and some Drowned Dead, who are like bonus-level drowners. 

We followed the tracks to an abandoned half-constructed house, where another conveniently-placed halfling gave us a key to get into the fully-constructed basement, wherein the Phantom was hiding-- ah, it’s a random Hound of the Wild Hunt. Fortunately it escaped in a cutscene that called Roach for us, as we were supposed to give chase on horseback.

We ran for a while and then just picked a likely-looking field and got off, and then fought the hound. Having put a point into a skill that lets you convert Adrenaline points into Vitality in moments of extremity saved our bacon, as Geralt definitely almost-died from this fucking thing and then revived at the last second. Hounds of the Wild Hunt, for the record, don’t give a fuck about Axii but really really really don’t like Igni. 

Eventually we melted the thing, and got paid for saving the halflings’ meadery. Thence to the next little quest marker, which involved saving some lady’s hens from a mysterious marauder. The mysterious marauder turned out to be a bunch of refugee children in the woods, and Geralt resolves the quest by convincing the old lady she should adopt the children.

On the way out DF paused for a moment, and I was like, “Why can’t Geralt just stand somewhere like a normal person?”

“Google Earth,” DF said, “always takin’ pics,” and rotated the camera to look at Geralt’s majestic streaming hair in the perpetual sunset.

Back to Novigrad, for Deadly Delights, which features a succubus. 

An amusing moment in the initial interview: the guard we’re speaking to as we find out the details of the quest is wearing questionable armor featuring the little circles that are meant to protect the wearer’s elbow joints... over his ears. Sort of... innovative I suppose?

MM is trying to predict how much clothing the succubus will wear, in her Sorceresses/Strumpets/Concubines Hierarchy Of Women’s Outfits In This Fucking Game. “She can’t have her tits out,” I said. 

“I mean,” DF said, “she could, there have very much been tits in this game.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. There sure have. 

Meanwhile DF is maneuvering Geralt through a crowd roughly the way he himself walks through a crowd in real life, featuring Having No Idea Where His Shoulders Actually Are; he tends to ram people a lot. Amusingly, the NPCs tend to universally make weird sex grunts when rammed like that, and sometimes the women make disturbingly pleased little “ooh” noises that are absolutely not what a real person would do if someone rather large and substantial and wearing armor actually rammed their ass in a crowd. (Fortunately for the real-life crowds DF is occasionally in, he does not generally wear armor, though he does very occasionally, it’s worth mentioning...) (ha that got me to look through old pictures, here’s MM on an extremely festive occasion, yes she is extremely decorative)

Anyhow we followed a scent trail inconclusively but then found another clue that led us to a whorehouse. Which featured an assortment of Strumpets in booty shorts, occasionally gyrating purposelessly on tables to no apparent audience. The amusing thing was that the whorehouse functioned like any shop, and so DF hauled up his inventory and sold all the junk he was carrying around, featuring ten human skulls among other things. 

There’s an Axii option, talking to the house’s madam, so we took it. They reward you so handsomely in XP every time you use Axii, it’s pretty evident they want you to just do that. So we did, and the madam told us where the succubus lives. (She’d been being super judgy before that. Like, lady, you run a whorehouse, and by the looks of it not well, you are not in any position to be judging Geralt’s life choices.)

(We were also like, DF, it looks like you can hire the prostitutes. DF was like “I am not going through the rigamarole of getting a mystical veneral disease for this quest, forget it.”) 

On our way to the succubus we had to stop and listen to the bards in the middle of the square, because they were working very hard and nobody was appreciating them.

The succubus herself was sort of anticlimactic. Because, here’s the thing-- she’s sapient. Geralt’s like hey, I know what you are, and she’s like yeah I know what you are, and he’s like so listen you killed some guys, we can’t be having with that, killing guys makes them hire a Witcher. And she’s like, I see that, and I only killed them because I was threatened. He’s like fair, fair, and at this point you could have fought her, but like. It seemed mean. So he was like listen can you get out of town? I don’t think it’s safe for you here anyway. And she’s like yeah I was kind of thinking that. So he’s like then you’re good? You got a safe way out? and she’s like yeah, I’m good. And he’s like cool, then I’ll lie to the people who hired me and I never saw you, chill? and she’s like yeah, chill, and that’s it. 

I guess you can fight her and kill her and get some rare component but like. Why? She was chill. Also she was not dressed particularly racily, and she had goat legs and like, full-body markings, so that was interesting. 

I’m gonna cut this in half and do the last, final, last bit of writeup later: we went to Skellige just for shits and giggles for our last night, to do one piddly little quest before it dropped off for being too low-level, and I’ll write about that later.